We will now explore how Equinix, Microsoft Azure
Stack, and Hewlett Packard
Enterprise (HPE)’s Cloud28+
are helping managed service providers (MSPs) and businesses alike obtain
world-class hybrid cloud services.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to explain more about new
breeds of hybrid cloud solutions are David Anderson,
Global Alliance Director at Equinix for its Microsoft alliance, and Xavier Poisson,
Vice-President of Worldwide Services Providers Business and Cloud28+ at HPE. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner,
Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: There seems to be a paradox when
it comes to hybrid cloud -- that it works best in close proximity
technologically yet has the most business payoff when you distribute it far and
wide. So how are Equinix, Microsoft, and HPE together helping to solve this
paradox of proximity and distribution?
 |
| Anderson |
Anderson: That’s a great question. You are right that
hybrid cloud does tend to work better when there is proximity between the
hybrid installation and the actual public cloud you are connecting to. That
proximity can actually be lengthened with what we call interconnectedness.
Interconnectedness is really
business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-cloud private network Ethernet
connections. Equinix is positioned with more than 200 data centers worldwide,
the most interconnections by far around the world. Every network provider is in
our data centers. We also work with cloud providers like Microsoft. The Equinix Cloud Exchange connects businesses and enterprises to those clouds through our
Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric. It’s a simple one-port virtual connection, using
software-defined networking (SDN), up to the public clouds.
That provides low-latency and
high-performance connections -- up to 10 Gigabit network links. So you can now run
a hybrid application and it’s performing as if it’s sitting in your corporate
data center not far away.
The idea is to be hybrid and to be more dispersed. That dispersion takes place through the breadth of our reach at Equinix with more than 200 data centers in 45 metro areas all over the world -- and so, interconnected all over.
Plus, there are more than 50 Microsoft Azure regions. We’re working closely with Microsoft so that we can
get the cloud out to the
customers fairly easily using the network service providers
in our facilities. There are very few places on Earth where a customer can’t
get from where they are to where we are, to a cloud – and with a really high-quality
network link.
Gardner: Xavier, why is what we just heard a
good fit for Cloud28+? How do you fit in to make hybrid clouds possible across different
many regions?
 |
| Poisson |
Poisson: HPE has invested a lot in intellectual
property in building our own HPE and Microsoft Azure Stack solution. It’s
designed to provide the experience of a private cloud while using Microsoft as
your technology’s tool.
Our customers want two
things. The first is to be able to execute clouds on-premises, but also to
connect to wider public clouds. This is enabled by what we are doing with a
partner like Equinix. We can jump from on-premises to off-premises for an end-user
customer.
The second is, when a
customer decides to go to a new architecture around hybrid cloud, they may need
to get reach and this reach is difficult now.
So, how we can support
partners to find the right place, the right partners at the right moment in the
right geographies with the right service level agreements (SLAs) for them to meet
their business needs?
The fact that we have
Equinix inside of Cloud28+ as a very solid partner is helping our customers and
partners to find the right route. If I am an enterprise customer in Australia
and I want to reach into Europe, or reach into Japan, I can, through Cloud28+, find
the right service providers to operate the service for me. But I will also be hosted
by a very compelling co-location company like Equinix, with the right SLAs. And
this is the benefit for every single customer.
This has a lot of benefits for
our MSPs. Why? Because our MSPs are evolving their
technologies, evolving their go-to-market strategies, and they need to adapt.
They need to jump from one country to another country, and they need to have a
sustainable network to make it all happen. That’s what Equinix is providing.
Together
we can provide choice for partners and end-user customers in one place, which
is Cloud28+. It’s really amazing.
Gardner: What are some of the compelling new use
cases, David? What are you seeing that demonstrates where this works best? Who
should be thinking about this now as a solution?
Data distribution solutions
Anderson: The solution -- especially combined with
Microsoft Azure Stack -- is suited to those regions that have had data
sovereignty and regulatory compliance issues. In other words, they can’t actually
put their data into the public cloud, but they want to be able to use the
power, elasticity, and the compute potential of the public cloud for big data analytics,
or whatever else they want to do with that data. And so they need to have that
data adjacent to the cloud.
Same for an Azure Stack
solution. Oftentimes it will be in situations where they want to do DevOps. The
developers might want to develop in the cloud, but they are going to bring it
down to a private Azure Stack installation because they want to manage the hardware
themselves. Or they actually might want to run that cloud in a place where public
Azure may not yet have an availability zone. That could be sub-Saharan Africa,
or wherever it might be -- even on a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean.
There's
a lot of legacy hardware out there. The need is for applications to run
on a cloud, but the hardware can't be virtualized. These workloads
could be moved to Equinix and then connect to a cloud.
Another use case that we are
driving hard right now with Microsoft, HPE, and Cloud28+ is on the idea of an enterprise
cage, where there is a lot of legacy hardware out there. The need is for
applications to run to some degree on a cloud, but the hardware can’t be
virtualized. But these workloads could be moved to an Equinix data center and
connected to the cloud. They can then use the cloud for the compute part, and
all of a sudden they are still getting value out of that legacy hardware, in a
cloud environment, in a distributed environment.
Other areas where this is of
value include a [data migration] appliance that is shipped out to a customer.
We’ve worked a lot with Microsoft on this. The customer will put up to 100 TB
of data on the appliance. It then gets shipped to one of our data centers where
it’s hooked up through high-speed connection to Azure and the data can be
ingested into Azure.
Now, that’s a onetime thing,
but it gives us and our service providers on Cloud28+ the opportunity to talk
to customers about what they are going to do in the cloud and what sort of help
might you need.
Scenarios like that provide an
opportunity to learn more about what enterprises are actually trying to do in
the cloud. It allows us then to match up the service providers in our ecosystem,
which is what we use Cloud28+ for with enterprise customers who need help.
Gardner: Xavier, it seems like this solution democratizes
the use of hybrid clouds. Smaller organizations, smaller MSPs with a niche,
with geographic focus, or in a vertical industry. How does this go down market
to allow more types of organizations to take advantage of the greatest power of
hybrid cloud?
Hybrid cloud power packaged
Poisson: We have packaged the solutions together
with Equinix by default. That means that MSPs can just cherry pick to provide
new cloud offerings very quickly.
Also, as I often say, the IT
value chain has not changed that much. It means that if you are a small enterprise,
let’s say in the United States, and you want to shape your new generation of IT,
do you go directly to a big cloud provider? No, because you still believe in
your systems integrator (SI), and in your value-added reseller (VAR).
Interestingly, when we package
this with Equinix and Microsoft, having this enterprise cage, the VARs can take
the bull by the horns. Because, when the customer comes to them and says, “Okay,
what should I do, where should put my data, how can I do the public cloud but
also a private cloud?” The VAR can guide them because they have an answer
immediately -- even for small- to medium-sized (SMB) businesses.
If you are a start-up, for
example, you have a new business, and you need to find MSPs everywhere on the
globe. How you do that? If you go to Cloud28+ you can see that there are
networks of service providers or learn what we have done with Equinix. That can
empower you in just a few clicks.
We give the access to partners
who have been publishing more than 900 articles in less than six months on
various topics such as security, big data, interconnection, globalization, artificial
intelligence (AI), and even the EU’s General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR). They learn and they find offerings because
the articles are connected directly to those offering services, and they can
get in touch.
We
are easing the process -- from the thought leadership, to the offerings with
explanations. What we are seeing is that the VARs and the SIs are still playing
an enormous role.
So, it’s not only Microsoft, with HPE,
and with the data centers of Equinix, but we put the VARs into the middle of
the conversation. Why? Because they are near the SMBs. We want to make
everything as simple as you just put in your credit card and you go. That’s
fair enough for some kinds of workloads.
But in most cases,
enterprises still go to their SIs and their VARs because they are all part of
the ecosystem. And then, when they have the discussion with their customers,
they can have the solution very, very quickly.
Gardner: Seems to me that for VARs and SIs, the
cloud was very disruptive. This gives them a new lease on life. A middle ground
to take advantage of cloud, but also preserve the value that they had already been
giving.
Take the middle path
Poisson: Absolutely. Integration services are
key, application migrations are key, and security topics are very, very
important. You also have new areas such as AI and blockchain technologies.
For example, in Asia-Pacific
and Europe, Middle East and Asia (EMEA), we have more-and-more tier-two service
providers that are not only delivering their best services but are now
investing in practices around AI or blockchain -- or combine them with security
-- to upgrade their value propositions in the market.
For VARs and for Sis, it is
all benefit because they know that solutions exist, and they can accompany
their customers to the transition. For them, this is all also a new flow of
revenue.
Gardner: As we get the word out that these distributed
hybrid cloud solutions are possible and available, we should help people
understand which applications are the right fit. What are the applications that
work well in this solution?
The
hybrid solution gives SIs, service providers, and enterprises more
flexibility than if they try and move an application completely into the
cloud.
Anderson: The interesting thing is that
applications don’t have to be architected in a specific way, based on the way
we do hybrid solutions. Obviously, the apps have to be modern.
I go back to my engineering
days 25 years ago, when we were separating data and compute and things like
that. If they want to write a front-end and everything in platform-as-a-service
(PaaS) on Azure and then connect that down to legacy data, it will work. It
just works.
The hybrid situation gives SIs,
service providers, and enterprises more flexibility than if they try and move
an application, whatever it is, completely into the cloud, because that
actually takes a lot more work.
Some service providers believe
that hybrid is a transitory stage, that enterprises would go to hybrid just to
buy them time till they go fully public cloud. I don’t believe Microsoft thinks
that way, and we certainly don’t think that way. I think there is a permanent
place for hybrid cloud.
In fact, one of the
interesting things when I first got to Equinix was that we had our own sellers
saying, “I don’t want to talk to the cloud guys. I don’t want them in our data
centers because they are just going to take my customers and move them to the
cloud.”
The truth of the matter is
that demand for our data centers has increased right along with the increase in
public cloud consumption. So it’s a complementary thing, not a substitution
thing. They need our data centers. What they are trying to do now is to close
their own enterprise data centers.
And they are getting into
Equinix and finding out that the connectivity possibilities and -- especially
in the Global 2000
enterprises -- nobody wants cloud vendor lock-in. They are all multicloud. Our Equinix
Cloud Exchange Fabric solution is a great way to get in at one
point and be able to connect to multiple cloud providers from right there.
It gives them more
flexibility in how they design their apps, and also more flexibility in where
they run their apps.
Gardner: Do you have any examples of
organizations that have already done this? What demonstrates the payoffs? When
you do this well, what do you get for it?
Cloudify your networks
Anderson: We have
worked with customers in these situations where they have come in initially for
a connection to Microsoft, let’s say. Then we brought them together with a
service provider and worked with them on network transformations to the point
where they have taken their old networks – a lot of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and everything else that were really very
costly and didn’t perform that well -- and ended up being able to rework their
networks. We like to say they cloudify their networks, because a lot of
enterprise networks aren’t really ready for the heavy load of getting out to
the cloud.
And
we ended up increasing their performance by up to 10, 15, 20 times -- and at
the same time cut their networking costs in half. Then they can turn around and
reinvest that in applications. They can also then begin to spin up cloud apps,
and just provision them, and not have to worry about managing the infrastructure.
They want the same thing in a hybrid
world, which is where those service providers that we find on Cloud28+ and that
we amplify, come in. They can build those managed services, whether it’s a
managed Azure Stack
offering or anything else. That enables the enterprise IT shops to essentially
do the same thing with hybrid that they are doing with public cloud – they can buy
it on a consumption model. They are not managing the hardware because they are
offloading that to someone else.
Gardner: Xavier, we have talked about SIs, VARs,
and MSPs. It seems to me that for who we used to call independent software
vendors (ISVs), the former packaged software providers, that this hybrid cloud
model also offers a new lease on life. Does this work for the applications providers,
too?
Extend your reach
Poisson: Yes, absolutely. And we have many, many
examples in the past 12 months of ISVs, software companies, coming to Cloud28+
because we give them the reach.
Lequa AB, a Swedish company, for example, has been doing identity
management, which is a very hot topic in digital transformation. In the digital
transformation you have your role when you speak to me, but in your other associations
you have another role. The digital transformation of these roles needs to be handled,
and Lequa has done that.
And by partnering with
Cloud28+, they have been able to extend their reach in ways they wouldn’t ever
have otherwise. Only in the past six months, they have been in touch with more
than 30 service providers across the world. They have already closed deals.
If
I am only providing baseline managed information services, how can I
differentiate from the hyperscale cloud providers? MSPs now care more
about the applications to differentiate themselves in the market.
If I am only providing
baseline managed information services, how can I differentiate from the
hyperscale cloud providers? How can I differentiate from even my own competitors?
What we have seen is that the MSPs are now caring more about the application makers,
the former ISVs, in order for them to differentiate in the market.
So, yes, this is a big trend
and we welcome into Cloud28+ more and more ISVs every week, yes.
Gardner: David, another concern that
organizations have is as they are distributing globally, as there are more
moving parts in a hybrid environment, things become more complex. Is there something
that HPE is doing with new products like OneSphere
that will help? How do we allow people to gain confidence that they can manage
even something that’s a globally distributed hybrid set of applications?
Confident connections in global clouds
Anderson: There are a number of ways we are
partnering with HPE, Microsoft, and others to do that. But one of the keys is
the Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric, where now they only have to manage one wire
or fiber connection in a switching fabric. That allows them to spin up
connections to virtually all of the cloud providers, and span those connections
across multiple locations. And so that makes it easier to manage.
The APIs that drive the
Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric can be consumed and viewed with tools such as HPE
OneSphere to be able to manage everything across the solution. The MSPs are also
having to take on more and be the ones that provide management.
As the huge, multinational
enterprises disperse their hybrid clouds, they will tend to view those in silos.
But they will need one place to go, one view to look at, to know what’s in each
set of data centers.
At Equinix, our three
pillars are the ideas of being able to reach everywhere, interconnect
everything, and integrate everything. That idea says we need to be the place to
put that on top of HPE with the service providers because then that gives you
that one place that reaches those multiple clouds, that one set of solid, known,
trusted advisors in HPE and the service providers that are really certified
through Cloud28+. So now we have built this trusted community to really serve
the enterprises in a new world.
Gardner: Before we close out, let’s take a look
into the crystal ball. Xavier, what should we expect next? Is this going to
extend to the edge with the Internet of Things (IoT), more machine learning (ML)-as-a-service
built into the data cloud? What comes next?
The future is at the Edge
Poisson: Today we are 810 partners in Cloud28+.
We cover more than 560 data centers in more than 34 countries. We have been
publishing nearly 30,000 cloud services in only two years. You see how fast it
has been growing.
What do we expect in the
future? You named it: Edge is a very hot topic for us and for Equinix. We plan
to develop new offering in this area, even new data center technology. It will
be necessary to have new findings around what a data center of tomorrow is, how
it will consume energy, and what we can do with it together.
We are already engaged in
conversations between Equinix, ourselves, and another company within the Cloud28+
community to discuss what the future data center could be.
A huge benefit of having this community
is that by default we innovate. We have new ideas because it's coming through
all of the partners. Yes, edge computing is definitely a very hot spot.
For the platform itself, I
believe that even though we do not monetize in the data center, which is one of
the definitions of Cloud28+, the revenues at the edge are for the partners, and
this is also by design.
Nonetheless, we are thinking
of new things such as a smart contracting around IoT and other topics, too. You
need to have a combination of offerings to make a project. You need to have
confidentiality between players. At the same time, you need to deliver one
solution. So next it may be solutions on best ways for contracting. And we
believe that blockchain can add a lot of value in that, too.
Cloud28+
is a community and a digital business platform. We are thinking of such
things as smart contracting for IoT and using blockchain in many
solutions.
Cloud28+ is a community
and a digital business platform. By the way, we are very happy to have been
recognized as such by Gartner
in several research notes since September 2017. We want to start to include
these new functions around smart contracting and blockchain.
The other part of the
equation is how we help our members to generate more business. Today we have a
module that is integrated into the platform to amplify partner articles and
their offerings through social media. We also have a lead-generation engine,
which is working quite well.
We want to launch an electronic
lead-generation capability through our thought leadership articles. We believe
that if we can give the feedback to the people filling in these forms, with how
they position versus all of their peers, on how they position versus the
industry analysts, they will be very eager to engage with us.
And the last piece is we
need to examine more around using ML across all of these services and
interactions between people. We need to deep dive on this to find what value we
can bring from out of all this traffic, because we have such traffic now inside
Cloud28+ that trends are becoming clear.
For instance, I can say to
any partner that if they publish an article on what is happening in the public
sector today, it will have a yield that is x-times the one that has been
published at an earlier date. All this intelligence, we have it. So what we are
packaging now is how to give intelligence back to our members so they can capture
trends very quickly and publish more of what is most interesting to the people.
But in a nutshell, these are
the different things that we see.
Gardner: And I know that evangelism and
education are a big part of what you do at Cloud28+. What are some great places
that people can go to learn more?
Poisson: Absolutely. You can read not only what
the partners publish, but examine how they think, which gives you the direction
on how they operate. So this is building trust.
For me, at the end of the
day, for an end-user customer, they need to have that trust to know what they
will get out of their investments.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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