by DavidSpratt | May 12, 2014 | ICT
When over 2000 people attended the Amazon Summit in Auckland recently, it was a clear sign that cloud-based services are now mature and garnering ever-increasing acceptance. Thousands more are attending Amazon’s partner roadshow around the country this month.
As if to cement our market’s acceptance of cloud services, Microsoft recently awarded Datacom its “Cloud Services provider of the Year Award” for its Zespri IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) project running over Microsoft’s own Azure Cloud platform.
For Datacom this was a big ‘thumbs up’ from Microsoft. It also confirmed that cloud services in New Zealand will, for a number of valid business reasons, often be a hybrid combination of local and international services. In this case the hybrid was a combination of cloud services from Microsoft’s Azure Cloud and Datacom’s own Enterprise Cloud service running out of its Kapua and Orbit data centres.
So while hybrid cloud flexes its muscles across New Zealand and around the world, life is never simple. The issue that has been taxing my mind for the past few months has not been the architectural or the transition requirements for moving to a hybrid cloud model. My preoccupation has more been with understanding, describing and delivering the Service Management that follows transition to the cloud.
The question is ‘How does a company or its provider measure, monitor, manage and optimise an environment where some or all of the components are delivered from behind a firewall, potentially thousands of miles away?’ (more…)
by DavidSpratt | Mar 31, 2014 | ICT
Owning and operating computer equipment is becoming as redundant a concept as using generators to access electricity. While there are cases where generators are essential these are niche applications. The rest of us just plug into the grid with a three pin plug! Utility computing is exactly the same and will rapidly transform the way we see IT. Of course change of this magnitude has a big impact on people…
This article describes the challenge for organisations who are having difficulty persuading the existing IT technologists to get past the fear of losing their jobs or becoming irrelevant, when the reality is often quite the opposite. This has proved a significant barrier to acceptance of cloud computing in the New Zealand marketplace.
From Total Utilities perspective, we are seeing the focus move away from technologists owning and operating equipment and towards financial and capacity monitoring and analysis as a core activity. It is no longer a question of ‘Which brand do I use and does it have flashing lights?’. Rather it is ‘How do I cost my options and then monitor capacity and financial performance once I am committed?’
That’s where we come in.
Read the Herald article here
by DavidSpratt | Mar 17, 2014 | ICT
Once again a major cloud provider – on this occasion Google – has slashed the price of storage – this time for ordinary consumers. Note that these changes apply to all customers not just those signing new subscriptions.
Users considering cloud storage should note their contract terms, urges David Spratt of Total Utilities Management Group. “If you are locked in to a price for two or three years you may miss many, many price cuts over the contract term, while your storage needs double or even quadruple.”
“In the business sector we expect to see continued price pressure being brought to bear on local NZ hosting, cloud server and cloud storage providers to compete with the scale, contract flexibility, reliability and sheer pricing power of the likes Google, Amazon, RackSpace HP and Microsoft.”
Read the Computer World article here
by DavidSpratt | Jan 16, 2014 | ICT
Looking back over 2013 with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the New Zealand mobile phone market was defined by four key things last year:
- The smart phone’s complete dominance of the mobile device market. Yes I know some of you still love your Nokia flip top, but the sale of loss-making Nokia’s smart phone division to Microsoft shows just how far the mighty have fallen in the market where Nokia were once supreme. Alongside this shift we have seen the rise of Samsung as a direct and powerful competitor to Apple’s iPhone range. During 2014 expect price competition to continue apace in the handset market.
- Heavy price discounting in the New Zealand market as the major players struggle with a lack of differentiation in their services, handsets and coverage.
- A shift from text-based communication to Instant Messaging. The days of businesses spending big dollars on thousands of texts a month are now largely gone. Instead smart phones are delivering Instant Messaging and email services to the user over mobile data networks.
- The rapid expansion of mobile data services usage. For each of the last three years the uptake of smart phone and 3G and 4G capable tablet devices has meant a doubling of mobile data consumption year on year. In 2014 most businesses will be using eight times the mobile data they consumed back in 2011. Double that again in 2015 and that consumption number becomes 16 times!
So what is the smartest response to these four biggies when budget setting for 2014? Read more…
by DavidSpratt | Jan 16, 2014 | ICT
Last year the mobile phone market was shaped by four key factors: the dominance of the smart phone; heavy price discounting; a shift from text-based communication to Instant Messaging; and the rapid expansion of mobile data services usage. Smart budgeting for 2014 should respond to these market changes.
Capital Planning
Smart phones are much more expensive than the old flip tops, despite the increased price competition arising from Samsung’s aggressive positioning against Apple and Micosoft/Nokia. The majority of mobile calling vendors offer a ‘subsidy pool’ from which businesses draw when purchasing new or replacing old mobiles. These ‘subsidies’ are little more than a capex to opex conversion with opex increased as part of the monthly phone plan cost and capex reduced accordingly. Analysing the true cost of the subsidy and assessing whether it meets your planned replacement and new purchase requirements can save you from incurring a significant amount of wasted financial resources during the term of the contract. Note also that replacing a broken or lost phone from the subsidy pool will usually mean signing a new contract with a new expiry date. The ‘break fees’ associated with contracts provide vendors with a useful mechanism to discourage you from moving to a better deal with a new supplier when the main contract expires. (more…)
When over 2000 people attended the Amazon Summit in Auckland recently, it was a clear sign that cloud-based services are now mature and garnering ever-increasing acceptance. Thousands more are attending Amazon’s partner roadshow around the country this month.
