Techaisle Blog

The rigor in data collection, the depth in data analysis and the accuracy in forward looking insights that Techaisle brings in its small business & midmarket research has extended to enterprise. Techaisle’s US Enterprise Cloud Adoption Trends provides an in-depth and definitive look into the state of cloud adoption within large businesses.

1. Only 18% of US enterprises have mature cloud adoption and are optimizing usages; 36% have a cautious approach to cloud. Smaller size large enterprises have reached maturity stage whereas larger sized enterprises have ad hoc approach to cloud
2. In 92% of US enterprises, IT has a voice on the Board and helps drive the direction of the business rather than business deciding IT needs
3. Top IT challenge is implementing new strategic IT applications to improve organization’s competitiveness; 74% believe that investments in cloud increases their competitiveness
4. Greatest benefit of cloud is the ability to launch new products and services
5. 61% want seamless integration with on-premise systems
6. For 65% of US enterprises, security and regulatory compliance is the biggest challenge in developing strategies for cloud adoption
7. In 60% of enterprises data sovereignty and privacy are preventing acceleration of cloud
8. 75% of US enterprises have adopted Hybrid cloud but the largest penetration growth is expected in the use of public cloud
9. 74% are using Amazon AWS but Microsoft Azure is not far behind at 65%
10. 20% of US enterprises use all three types of cloud deployment – private, public and hybrid but the future looks very different

The research deliverable covers several topics including:

• Top 10 Enterprise IT challenges & business issues
• Enterprise Cloud adoption maturity – ad hoc to mature
• Greatest benefits of using Cloud
• Factors driving cloud adoption strategy
• Key attributes of a good cloud solution
• Challenges in developing strategies for cloud adoption
• Factors preventing Enterprises from accelerating cloud adoption
• Current & Planned adoption of services, type of deployment & workloads
• Current & planned cloud applications
• Enterprise cloud best practices - hybrid cloud, hybrid IT
• Enterprise cloud security best practices
• Use of public cloud within enterprises
• Benefits of Public Cloud adoption
• Top drivers of Public Cloud adoption
• Key challenges in implementing public cloud
• Workloads being transferred to Public Cloud
• Key Industry segments using Public Cloud services to derive its benefits
• Types and brands of public Cloud platform being used - Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM SoftLayer
• Comparative analysis of AWS, Azure, Google, SoftLayer
• Influencing the Cloud buyer, mapping the buyer’s journey
• Influencing the C-Suite

The Techaisle research contains a wealth of data that marketers can use to understand cloud adoption within the US enterprises and build IT buyer-centric marketing initiatives.

Data from Techaisle’s study channel partners (research analysis documented in Techaisle’s series of reports either delivered individually or as Channel Partner Research Annual subscription service) tell fascinating stories. Excerpt from the specific study of 650 US channel partners selling managed services, based on Techaisle’s database of over 250,000 partners, shows that the sales cycle length varies not only by line of business, but also by expertise levels:

• Cloud provider channel, on average takes 2 weeks longer in its sales cycle as a cloud provider channel
• Systems Integrators’ average sales cycle is ~1.5X of VARs because of complexity of SI’s engagement with an SMB. VARs, are often selling products into existing accounts, have relatively short sales cycles, while SIs, who are positioning complex solutions, have longer sales cycles than other channel businesses
• Even a consultant who is usually familiar to an SMB organization has to prove that they are the right partner and it involves building a plan and showcasing why their advice and solution would be ideal for SMBs

More fascinating are the four charts below.

The rise in virtualization has been driving an accompanying demand for converged infrastructure or hyperconvergence: products that combine processing, storage and networking into a robust and scalable unit that can support and respond to the options inherent in virtualization. While the migration from separate server, storage and networking products to converged infrastructure is still in its early stages, the Techaisle SMB virtualization & converged infrastructure survey shows that it is beginning to gain traction, especially within more sophisticated SMB accounts.

Scale computing, launched in 2008, based out of Indianapolis with development in San Francisco bay area and offices in London, Paris, Toronto and Dubai made its SMB focused hyperconvergence launch at VMworld in 2012. Since then Scale Computing has implemented over 6,000 systems in a little over 1,600 customers.

As per Techaisle’s SMB virtualization and converged infrastructure survey, the key barriers to adopting hyperconvergence within SMBs are high cost of implementation, infrastructure disruption during roll-out, greater-than-anticipated time and resource investment, and the complexity of integrating new infrastructure units with existing infrastructure. For example, a pet peeve of SMBs when using VMware on HP Proliant DL380 G8 is their inability to use cloud migration to upgrade or add G8 or G9. These are the issues that Scale Computing is trying to address. In defense of VMware, although the initial code base of ESX was never built to be self-aware, VMware is working on it.

Intrinsic to positioning any IT-enabled solution is an understanding of the benefits that the customer anticipates obtaining from deployment of the technology. Buyers need to understand how the solution helps them to increase revenues, cut costs, improve efficiency or otherwise enhance shareholder value; vendors need to be able to position their offerings as a means to achieving these objectives.

While there is a close relationship between “analytics” and “Big Data” – and they are often conflated in the press – the two technologies follow somewhat different paths into SMB user environments. Techaisle research has found that analytics solutions tend to be driven by BDMs – business users looking for better ways of approaching high-priority business issues. In some cases, this requires access to vast quantities of high-velocity, variegated sources, which in turn demands a Big Data solution – but in contrast to analytics adoption, Big Data initiatives rely heavily on IT for implementation and ongoing management, and represents a solution area that requires collaboration between BDMs and ITDMs.

While SMB Big Data buyers view support for (predictive) analytics as their top acquisition driver, they also have distinct needs and preferences that suppliers must consider in building a sales and marketing strategy.