Is Enterprise Wary of the Public Cloud?
Is Enterprise Wary of the Public Cloud? by UCStrategies Staff
Although there has been talk about public nervousness about utilizing public cloud services for data and applications, around 30 percent of Amazon Web Services' customers are big businesses. It would seem that there is cloud confidence in that sector at least.
According to GigaOm's Barb Darrow, cloud industry leaders claim that there is much less nervousness and reluctance to migrate to the public cloud than there appears to be. Many large businesses are deploying public cloud applications with service providers like Amazon.
According to a senior member of personnel at Amazon Web Services, “Some AWS partners said the company prefers to work under the radar in general and that stealth mode hid what they say is an escalated enterprise sales push. AWS has hired sales engineers and others from enterprise-focused companies like HP, SunGard and EMC. We like that our competitors don’t think we’re active in the enterprise. When they find out it’ll be too late.”
Darrow states that AWS currently draws in around $2 billion annually. Many other large enterprises have already migrated to the public cloud space, including Microsoft, HP, IBM and RackSpace.
Although Amazon is keeping pretty quiet about its relationship to large enterprise, there are clues to be found from their industry partners. Sharon Wagner, CEO of Cloudyn, estimates that around 30 percent of Amazon’s clients are within large companies. “You’d be surprised just how many companies have already made the move [to AWS],” said Ken Ziegler, CEO of Logicworks. “It’s not just Netflix.”
Other sources claim that Amazon encourages companies to sign up with promotional deals and discounts to enterprises which spend over $250,000 per year in AWS business. This is more of an incentive than in 2012 when Amazon was only offering benefits to companies which were spending in excess of $1 million each year.
Amazon is wary, however of companies like IBM and HP, who have long-standing relationships with big enterprise clients.
“AWS feels that IBM entering with SmartCloud and HP with its public cloud may take away enterprise customers because [those older vendors] have much better relationships with them,” said one AWS partner.
Enterprises will continue to rely on technology services that manage and host from their own data centers as wells as services which are accessed from SaaS and cloud providers. Enterprise is no longer perturbed by services that are available outside of their firewall.
Cloud services are providing a greater number of options, which makes it better for everyone. (CU) Link