lustratus REPAMA

Posts Tagged ‘proposition segmentation’

As mentioned earlier in these pages I’m documenting my quest to arrive at a market segmentation model of the cloud computing market. This will allow me to perform a series of REPAMA competitive marketing studies into various vendors in the cloud computing space. I’m uncovering more and more interesting research as I go and one such piece is described below.

The smart people at NIST (The US Governmental agency responsible for something or other – standards I think) have released some interesting work on cloud computing. Aimed at reaching a common set of definitions around cloud computing and its use cases, but recognising that these will change over time, their work can be found here.

I’ve reproduced some sections below because I think they add something to my quest to segment the cloud computing market. That said, I think they’ve omitted, perhaps consciously, an important characteristic and that is the commercial arrangements around cloud computing – namely its pay per use nature.

Anyway here goes:

A Definition of Cloud Computing:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.

Essential Characteristics of Cloud Computing

On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service’s provider.

Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, laptops, and PDAs).

Resource pooling. The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense of location independence in that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or datacenter). Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, network bandwidth, and virtual machines.

Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be rapidly and elastically provisioned, in some cases automatically, to quickly scale out and rapidly released to quickly scale in. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be purchased in any quantity at any time.

Measured Service. Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service.

Service Models:

Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to use the provider’s applications running on a cloud infrastructure. The applications are accessible from various client devices through a thin client interface such as a web browser (e.g., web-based email). The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of limited user-specific application configuration settings.

Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages and tools supported by the provider. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly application hosting environment configurations.

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, deployed applications, and possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls).

Deployment Models:

Private cloud. The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organization. It may be managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.

Community cloud. The cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations and supports a specific community that has shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). It may be managed by the organizations or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.

Public cloud. The cloud infrastructure is made available to the general public or a large industry group and is owned by an organization selling cloud services.

Hybrid cloud. The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load-balancing between clouds).

I think this is a really nice and compact definition of cloud computing it characteristics and use cases. I particularly like the notes on deployment models which I certainly want to incorporate into my cloud computing market segmentation.

Kudos to Peter Mell and Tim Grance of NIST!

Danny Goodall

I’m continuing the REPAMA Segment Analysis Study into the Cloud Computing market attempting to arrive at a solid market segmentation and two things have become very clear.

Firstly, every vendor with a remotely related proposition appears to have added the word “cloud” to their product name, presumably in an attempt to bask in the reflected glory that cloud computing provides, perhaps in an effort to appease their investors. This means that there are a large number of vendors claiming to be part of specific segments that may or may not have legitimate claims. This makes the process I’m going through confusing and messy. And if I, as a marketing analyst am having problems, I wonder what sort of success a legitimate prospect would have in finding the product/service they need.

Secondly, the market is still in flux and as such nailing a clear segmentation down is, for some time, going to be like herding cats. This is a classic early market symptom where the market is currently led by vendors’ own ideas about what is needed and what is possible. Once the market starts to form properly and vendors align behind what their prospects and customers are actually buying, then the segmentation will become clearer.

But I have to start somewhere and the good news is that I’ve been corresponding with both Peter Laird of Tendril Inc. and Brad Buck of OpenCrowd and they both have given their blessing to this project and have offered to help if they can. Most importantly they are both happy for me to use their work on a cloud computing taxonomy/model, here and here, as a starting point for my cloud market segmentation.

One thing that I quickly realised was needed for my purposes was some form of professional services (human skills) offer. Plenty of large consultancies, smaller integrators and boutique IT shops offer consultancy services around cloud computing. Both Peter and Brad have rightly focussed on the categorisation of product capability and customer need in fleshing our “their” taxonomy. But to fully understand what propositions are being put together to service the cloud computing “need”, I must include cloud computing professional services.

So far I’ve identified the following list of services under the category of professional services. I suspect that it will grow some and be rationalised some before I finish.

• Strategy, planning and design
• Migration and implementation services
• Testing
• Security
• Cloud application design/porting
• Support services and training

I suspect that cloud application design/porting will be a relatively niche category for a while and that testing, security and support services may all become amalgamated as I carry on my research.

Another major category of cloud computing offer that has also presented itself is that of “Channel”. A number of organisations are white labelling, OEM’ing, reselling or otherwise fronting cloud vendors/service providers’ offerings. One concern that I have is that this sort of partnering is very common in hot early markets where one vendor with no cloud proposition hastily signs a partner agreement to simply tick a box. It does’t mean that either company will do any real business.  I’ll do some digging and and if it looks like a real enough category I’ll add it and blog on it soon.

Danny Goodall.

I have decided that the time is now right to take a detailed look at the marketing strategies and tactics adopted by the various vendors in the different market segments that make up the cloud computing market. This means that we’ll be carrying out a series of REPAMA Segment Analysis Studies to nail down how some of the vendors are taking their products to market. We’ve already looked at high-performance messaging, ESBs, BPM, Mainframe SOA and SOA adoption generally so now it’s the turn of cloud computing.

Lustratus has helped a number of cloud vendors with their go-to-market strategies and tactics over the last couple of years and one thing has been clear.  It has been a classic early market in that the protagonists were “selling” a technical proposition to technologists and not a great deal of actual business was being conducted. The market hadn’t fully formed and “sales” were not being made in a traditional way.

By that I mean that sales were being “bought” by vendors looking to gain early market share and the justification for most of these early market customer projects was typically R&D. But now the market seems to have found a bit of structure and organisations are starting to look seriously at cloud computing as a way of delivering on business imperatives, so now I feel the time is right to look at how vendors are lining up to address the market.  What are their value propositions, how are they positioned, why do they think they are unique and what features do they lead with?

All good questions, but where to start?

There are many different categories of offers and propositions all falling broadly under the banner of cloud computing and hundreds of different vendors that have aligned themselves with cloud computing.  Some of these vendors are using cloud as a cynical proposition slip-streaming exercise which I can’t blame them for:

Cloud is hot so let’s ensure we appear to have a proposition for cloud.

I would, and  indeed have done the same myself, but for the purposes of my analysis I’ll have to sort the wheat from the chaff. So first I need to do some preparatory work on proposition segmentation and the market taxonomy. In upcoming blogs I’ll share my thoughts on how that is shaping up and I’ll also start to share some of the early REPAMA findings as I go.

Danny Goodall