By Pavel Karelin, Director of Sales & Marketing, MadWolf Technologies LLC

The answer is that our horizon, in fact, has become way too clouded. Driven by fear of being left behind the cloud wagon, many more small providers are making substantial investments in their own cloud infrastructure. Large providers, with ATT being the latest entrant, are becoming more efficient and, most importantly, have started offering greater flexibility to consumers of their cloud services. This flexibility was the key reason why customers considered smaller vendors as their outsourcing partners. As major players have become more nimble and offer a greater variety of adjacent services, what is the advantage of selecting a smaller provider? How can a small company compete on cost with the likes of ATT or Google which have petabytes of storage equipment needed to feed their clouds delivered to them daily?

The equipment manufacturers are also perfecting their craft. Server virtualization is a mature market. Many storage vendors are fighting it out to offer the most fluid virtualized storage architecture. Application virtualization, which was more marketing than technology just a few years ago, is becoming real and making the underlying infrastructure layer largely irrelevant for an operational user.

It is very clear that the market is undergoing a major transition towards a hardware independent paradigm. How will it look like in a few years and what will be the role of a managed services provider? What skills will a company have to develop to continue being relevant and deliver value?

First, what will be the form of the “managed” aspect of the customer infrastructure? Having come from a place with many single-minded excesses (Russia liked the convenience and simplicity of a single goal for every citizen and the ultimate satisfaction of depleting any hope of success when resulting failure was so massive as to leave no doubt that the original premise was vastly erroneous), it is easy to learn that one-sided policy rarely works. The technology infrastructure landscape is likely to emerge as a highly functional hybrid model which will combine a customer owned infrastructure hosted at a customer’s office, an infrastructure piece which resides at a customer’s data center or at a vendor managed data center, a number of SaaS applications provisioned directly by the manufacturer, and a few applications residing on a cloud offered by a volume cloud provider. Each of those infrastructure islands will host an array of applications that exchange data with each other. A managed services provider will have to master the art of consistently managing these disjointed pieces and adhering to the set of SLA’s applicable to a particular application and the infrastructure platform which hosts these applications. 

In a drive for efficiency, customers will undoubtedly look for simplicity and will try to consolidate platforms. Even the least ambitious customers will start migrating some of their applications to either virtualized environments, or third-party clouds, or SaaS offerings. This will necessitate massive application migration projects with customers being increasingly concerned about preserving the functionality of the applications and their handling of data generated by the applications residing elsewhere.

Understanding the behavior of the applications and the associated data will become crucial for the success of both the migration projects and the overall management of these hybrid environments. Having hardware expertise alone will no longer be sufficient for successful infrastructure management. Managed services providers would be wise to continue building the application knowledge base and investing in application development and management resources.

Attending the N-Able summit on October 14 – 16, 2009 in Scottsdale, AZ, I asked N-Able CEO Gavin Garbutt if he saw that the traditional focus on managing infrastructure was becoming less relevant, with clients being concerned only about the behavior of their applications. The answer was that the future managed services platforms would be much more application-aware and would provide a solid set of measurements to assess the continuous health of their applications, with SLA’s tied directly to a particular class of applications. Survival of the fittest will mean survival of the most application-driven providers, those who have made solid and consistent investments in their application delivery and advisory capabilities. The understanding of how application behaves is becoming ever more important means to confidently navigating the “cloudy” skies of today’s IT.