The next BriefingsDirect cloud ecosystem strategies interview explores how a Canadian software provider delivers a
hybrid cloud platform for enterprises and service providers alike.
We'll now learn how Ormuco has identified underserved regions and has crafted a standards-based hybrid cloud platform to allow its users to attain world-class cloud services just about anywhere.
We'll now learn how Ormuco has identified underserved regions and has crafted a standards-based hybrid cloud platform to allow its users to attain world-class cloud services just about anywhere.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to help us explore how new
breeds of hybrid cloud are coming to more providers around the globe thanks to
the Cloud28+ consortium is Orlando Bayter, CEO and Founder of Ormuco in Montréal, and Xavier Poisson Gouyou Beachamps, Vice President of Worldwide
Indirect Digital Services at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), based in Paris. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Ormuco targets those countries that are
underserved by the hyperscale providers and enables service providers and
enterprises to consume cloud locally, in ways they can’t do today.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
·
HPE takes aim at customer needs for speed and agility in age of
IoT, hybrid everything
Gardner: Let’s begin with this notion of
underserved regions. Orlando, why is it that many people think that public cloud
is everywhere for everyone when there are many places around the world where it
is still immature? What is the opportunity to serve those markets?
Bayter: There are many countries underserved
by the hyperscale cloud providers. If you look at Russia, United Arab Emirates
(UAE), around the world, they want to comply with regulations on security, on data sovereignty, and they need to have the clouds locally to comply.
 |
| Bayter |
Gardner: Are you allowing them to have a private
cloud on-premises as an enterprise? Or do local cloud providers offer a common
platform, like yours, so that they get the best of both the private and public
hybrid environment?
Bayter: That is an excellent question. There
are many workloads that cannot leave the firewall of an enterprise. With that, you
now need to deliver the economies, ease of use, flexibility, and orchestration
of a public cloud experience in the enterprise. At Ormuco, we deliver a platform that provides
the best of the two worlds. You are still leaving your data center and you
don't need to worry whether it’s on-premises or off-premises.
It's
a single pane of glass. You can move the workloads in that global
network via established providers throughout the ecosystem of cloud
services.
It’s a single pane of glass. You can move the workloads in
that global network via established
providers throughout the ecosystem of cloud services.
Gardner: What are the attributes of this platform that both your enterprise and service provider customers are looking
for? What’s most important to them in this hybrid cloud platform?
Bayter: As I said, there are some workloads
that cannot leave the data center. In the past, you couldn’t get the public
cloud inside your data center. You could have built a private cloud, but you
couldn’t get an Amazon Web Services (AWS)-like solution or a Microsoft Azure-like solution on-premises.
We have
been running this now for two years and what we have noticed is that enterprises
want to have the ease-of-use, sales, service, and orchestration on-premises.
Now, they can connect to a public cloud based on the same platform and they
don’t have to worry about how to connect it or how it will work. They just decide
where to place this.
They have
security, can comply with regulations, and gain control -- plus 40 percent
savings compared with VMware, and up to 50 percent to 60 percent
compared with AWS.
Gardner: I’m also interested in the openness
of the platform. Do they have certain requirements as to the cloud model, such
as OpenStack? What is it that
enables this to be classified as a standard cloud?
Bayter: At Ormuco, we went out and checked
what are the best solutions and the best platform that we can bring together to
build this experience on-premises and
off-premises.
We saw
OpenStack, we saw Docker, and then we saw how to take, for
example, OpenStack and make it like a public cloud solution. So if you look at OpenStack,
the way I see it is as concrete, or a foundation. If you want to build a house
or a condo on that, you also need the attic. Ormuco builds that software to be
able to deliver that cloud look and feel, that self-service, all in open tools,
with the same APIs both on private and public clouds.
Learn How Cloud 28+
Of
Cloud Service Providers
Gardner: What is it about the HPE platform beneath that that supports
you? How has HPE been instrumental in allowing that platform to be built?
Community collaboration
Bayter: HPE has been a great partner. Through
Cloud28+ we are able to go to markets in places that HPE has a presence. They
basically generate that through marketing, through sales. They were able to
bring deals to us and help us grow our business.
From a
technology perspective, we are using HPE Synergy. With Synergy, we can provide composability,
and we can combine storage and compute into a single platform. Now we go
together into a market, we win deals, and we solve the enterprise challenges around
security and data sovereignty.
Gardner: Xavier, how is Cloud28+ coming to
market, for those who are not familiar with it? Tell us a bit about Cloud28+
and how an organization like Ormuco is a good example of how it works.
 |
| Poisson Gouyou Beauchamps |
Poisson: Cloud28+ is a community of IT players -- service providers, technology partners, independent
software vendors (ISVs), value added resellers, and universities -- that have
decided to join forces to enable digital transformation through cloud
computing. To do that, we pull our resources together to have a single platform.
We are allowing the enterprise to discover and consume cloud services from the
different members of Cloud28+.
We launched
Cloud28+ officially to the market on December 15, 2016. Today, we have more
than 570 members from across the world inside Cloud28+. Roughly 18,000
distributed services may be consumed and we also have system integrators that support
the platform. We cover more than 300 data centers from our partners, so we can
provide choice.
In fact, we
believe our customers need to have that choice. They need to know what is
available for them. As an analogy, if you have your smartphone, you can have an
app store and do what you want as a consumer. We wanted to do the same and
provide the same ease for an enterprise globally anywhere on the planet. We
respect diversity and what is happening in every single region.
Ormuco has been one of the first
technology partners. Docker is another one. And Intel is another. They have been working together
with HPE to really understand the needs of the customer and how we can deliver
very quickly a cloud infrastructure to a service provider and to an enterprise
in record time. At the same time, they can leverage all the partners from the
catalog of content and services, propelled by Cloud28+, from the ISVs.
Global ecosystem, by choice
Because we are bringing together a global ecosystem,
including the resellers, if a service provider builds a project through Cloud28+,
with a technology partner like Ormuco, then all the ISVs are included. They can
push their services onto the platform, and all the resellers that are part of
the ecosystem can convey onto the market what the service providers have been building.
We have a
lot of collaboration with Ormuco to help them to design their
solutions. Ormuco has been helping us to design what Cloud28+ should be,
because it's a continuous improvement approach on Cloud28+ and it’s via collaboration.
If
you want to join Cloud28+ to take, don't come. If you want to give, and
take a lot afterward, yes, please come, because we all receive a lot.
As I like to
say, “If you want to join Cloud28+ to take, don't come. If you want to give,
and take a lot
afterward, yes, please come, because we all receive a lot.”
Gardner: Orlando, when this all works well, whatdo your end-users gain in terms of business benefits? You mentioned reduction
in costs, that's very important, of course. But is there more about your
platform from a development perspective and an operational perspective that we
can share to encourage people to explore it?
Bayter: So imagine yourself with an
ecosystem like Cloud28+. They have 500 members. They have multiple countries,
many data centers.
Now imagine
that you can have the Ormuco solution on-premises in an enterprise and then be
able to burst to a global network of service providers, across all those regions.
You get the same performance, you get the same security, and you get the same
compliance across all of that.
For an end-customer,
you don’t need to think anymore where you’re going to put your applications. They
will go to the public cloud, they will go to the private cloud. It is agnostic.
You basically place it where you want it to go and decide the economies you
want to get. You can compare with the hyperscale providers.
That is the
key, you get one platform throughout our ecosystem of partners that can deliver
to you that same functionality and experience locally. With a community such as Cloud28+, we can accomplish something that was not possible before.
Gardner: So, just hoping to delineate between
the development and then the operations in production. Are you offering the
developer an opportunity to develop there and seamlessly deploy, or are you more
focused on the deployment after the applications are developed, or both?
Development to deployment
Bayter: With our solution, same as AWS or
Azure allows, a developer can develop their app via APIs, automated, use a
database of choice (it could be MySQL, Oracle), and the load balancing and the
different features we have in the cloud, whether it’s Kubernetes or Docker, build all that -- and
then when the application is ready, you can decide in which region you want to
deploy the application.
So you go
from development, to deployment technology of your choice, whether it’s Docker
or Kubernetes, and then you can deploy to the global network
that we’re building on Cloud28+. You can go to any region, and you don’t have
to worry about how to get a service provider contract in Russia, or how do I
get a contract in Brazil? Who is going to provide me with the service? Now you
can get that service locally through a reseller, a distributor, or have an ISV deploythe software worldwide.
Gardner: Xavier, what other sorts of
organizations should be aware of the Cloud28+ network?
Learn How Cloud 28+
Of
Cloud Service Providers
We accelerate go-to-market for startups, they gain immediate global reach with Cloud28+.
Poisson: We have the
technology partners like Ormuco, and we are thankful for what they
have brought to the community. We have service providers, of course, software
vendors, because you can publish your software in Cloud28+ and provision it on-premises or off-premises. We accelerate go-to-market for startups,
they gain immediate global reach with Cloud28+. So to all the ISVs, I say, “Come
on, come on guys, we will help you reach out to the market.”
System
integrators also, because we see this is an opportunity for the large
enterprises and governments with a lot of multi-cloud projects taking care,
having requirements for security. And
you know what is happening with security today, it's a hot topic. So people are
thinking about how they can have a multi-cloud strategy. System integrators are
now turning to Cloud28+ because they find here a reservoir of all the capabilities
to find the right solution to answer the right question.
Universities
are another kind of member we are working with. Just to explain, we know that
all the technologies are created first at the university and then they evolve.
All the startups are starting at the university level. So we have some very
good partnerships with some universities in several regions in Portugal,
Germany, France, and the United States. These universities are designing new
projects with members of Cloud28+, to answer questions of the governments, for
example, or they are using Cloud28+ to propel the startups into the market.
Ormuco is
also helping to change the business model of distribution. So distributors now
also are joining Cloud28+. Why? Because a distributor has to make a choice for its
consumers. In the past, a distributor had software inventory that they were pushing
to the resellers. Now they need to have an inventory of cloud services.
There is
more choice. They can purchase hyperscale services, resell, or maybe source to
the different members of Cloud28+, according to the country they want to
deliver to. Or they can own the platform using the technology of Ormuco, for
example, and put that in a white-label model for the reseller to propel it into
the market. This is what Azure is doing in Europe, typically. So new kinds of
members and models are coming in.
Digital transformation
Lastly, an enterprise can use Cloud28+ to make their digital
transformation. If
they have services and software, they can become a supplier inside of Cloud28+.
They source cloud services inside a platform, do digital transformation, and find
a new go-to-market through the ecosystem to propel their offerings onto the global
market.
Gardner: Orlando, do you have any examples that you could share with us of a service provider, ISV or enterprise that has white-labeled
your software and your capabilities as Xavier has alluded to? That’s a really
interesting model.
Bayter: We have been able to go-to-market to
countries where Cloud28+ was a tremendous help. If you look at Western Europe,
Xavier was just speaking about Microsoft Azure. They chose our platform and we
are deploying it in Europe, making it available to the resellers to help them
transform their consumption models.
They
provide public cloud and they serve many markets. They provide a
community cloud for governments and they provide private clouds for
enterprises -- all from a single platform.
If you look at the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region,
we have one of the largest managed service providers. They provide public cloud
and they serve many markets. They provide a community cloud for governments and
they provide private clouds for enterprises -- all from a single platform.
We also have
several of the largest telecoms in Latin America (LATAM) and EMEA. We have a US
presence, where we have Managed.com as a provider. So things are going
very well and it is largely thanks to what Cloud28+ has done for us.
Gardner: While this consortium is already very
powerful, we are also seeing new technologies coming to the market that should further
support the model. Such things as HPE New Stack, which is still in the works, HPE
Synergy’s composability and auto-bursting, along with security now driven into
the firmware and the silicon -- it’s almost as if HPE’s technology roadmap is
designed for this very model, or very much in alignment. Tell us how new technology
and the Cloud28+ model come together.
Bayter: So HPE New Stack is becoming the
control point of multi-cloud. Now what happens when you want to have that same experience
off-premises and on-premises? New Stack could connect to Ormuco as a resource
provider, even as it connects to other multi-clouds.
With an ecosystem like Cloud28+ all working together, we can connect
those hybrid models with service providers to deliver that experience to enterprises
across the world.
Learn How Cloud 28+
Of
Cloud Service Providers
Gardner: Xavier, anything more in terms of
how HPE New Stack and Cloud28+ fit?
Partnership is top priority
Poisson: It’s a
real collaboration. I am very happy with that because I have been working a
long time at HPE, and New Stack is a project that has been driven by thinking
about the go-to-market at the same time as the technology. It’s a big reward to
all the Cloud28+ partners because they are now de facto considered as resource
providers for our end-user customers – same as the hyperscale providers, maybe.
At HPE, we say we are in partnership first -- with our partners, or
ecosystem, or channel. I believe that what we are doing with Cloud28+, New
Stack, and all the other projects that we are describing – this will be the
reality around the world. We deliver on-premises for the channel partners.
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