Exploiting Amazon
What’s to Fear?
Service providers are looking to respond and compete with Amazons’ insatiable growth and dominance in the cloud market over the last few years – recently estimated at being 5 times larger than its nearest 14 competitors combined.
That trend and dominance has concerned a number of vendors in the cloud market, VMWares CEO recently stated at its partner conference that when “a workload goes to Amazon, you lose, and we have lost forever.”
With millions of ‘instances’ across its networks and counting almost all of the largest enterprises as customers, its no surprise that some vendors seem to believe that the approach that Service Providers have to take is to fight Amazon in a price war, build out their own niche or compete with them at their own game. But is that right? surely there are other options?
The Integrated Service opportunity
It’s time to take another look/perspective, with Abiquo v2.6 Service Providers now have the option to integrate their service offering with Amazon, allowing them to work with that market and exploit it. The opportunity is also there for Service Providers to provide Amazons infrastructure as though it were their own.
It’s wrong to assume that Amazon is perfect, it hasn’t got the best account management, it isn’t the easiest to use, it isn’t the fastest, most secure, or most convenient, it isn’t the easiest to understand the costs, nor is it easy for enterprises to unify and consolidate multiple accounts and control policies across them and nor have Amazon made it easy to move instances or workloads from them. There is plenty to improve upon!
Why not help those millions of customers, rather than considering them ‘lost forever’?
Instead, Service Providers should look to help those enterprises that are already using Amazon get more control, insight and efficiency out of those services. Help them align usage controls with their existing internal IT policies, manage their public and private cloud resources from one place, simplify the management of multiple accounts and place the right ‘workload’ into the right ‘cloud’.
Service Providers face a challenge selling cloud infrastructure services; their customers think it’s a choice between the Service Provider cloud, or the public cloud. With Abiquo’s support for Amazon, that choice is changed to a decision about service. Abiquo provides Service Providers with the means to wrap their own services around Amazon and improve the service for enterprises, in addition to providing almost infinite scale to their own offerings.
The enterprise customer can still get the flexibility and ubiquity of Amazon, but with the service and support from the Service Provider, who can offer a mix and match service, choosing where to place workloads based on SLA, compliance and performance. For the enterprise customer, they get full visibility, control and audit ability, with a single point of support for their business applications.
Abiquo allows customers to manage their private and AWS EC2 infrastructure as one
Create virtual data centres from AWS EC2 infrastructure
To download Abiquo v2.6, click here.
To read more about Abiquo v2.6, click here.