Latest News from Kapil Raval

Cloud Implementation: Ensuring Success

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 09:00:00 EDT

Deploying Cloud infrastructure is not a typical technology project. Success of a Cloud implementation depends on governance, policies, constraints and business relationship management. This article focuses on some basic important areas that cannot be ignored while implementing a Public Cloud solution. To keep it simple, let us focus on green-field implementation of a public cloud infrastructure. Like any other solution implementation, service providers need to focus on four key areas: Strategy, Business processes, Technology and people skills. Quite often, cloud implementations focus on infrastructure (and forget processes) and then see if the deployment meets their overall strategy or not. Such an approach results in unsuccessful implementations. Investing in business management, people and processes before the technology will ensure success with your cloud computing. Even in a green-field implementation, the right approach is to build and agree on the strategy first, ensure that business processes are aligned to meet the strategy; then focus on technology and people skills aligned to overall strategy. Such an approach ensures that the Cloud implementation meets the overall strategy and results in success. HP has a proven methodology, called Solution Consulting Services (SCS), to help Service Providers get better alignment of strategy, processes and technology while taking such a customer-centric journey. While taking any architectural decisions or at any change in technology, it is beneficial to evaluate impact on the overall strategy and service delivery to customers. For this reason, it is prudent to involve the marketing team during the implementation.

Public Cloud Computing: End-User Requirements

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 07:00:00 EDT

Before planning for the deployment of the Cloud computing infrastructure, it's important to understand what is important to Cloud customers and what their areas of concerns are. Customers want virtual services made available to them as and when their business needs, in configurations and sizes that meet their technical requirements. Faster deployment with self-service portal will result in quick time-to-market for the end users. Customers want to focus on their core business and get relieved from IT related tasks. Customers do not want to worry about software licenses, patch analysis and updates. They are focused on consuming the service which is expected to be secure, stable and available.

Cloud Computing: Opportunities for Communication Service Providers

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:15:00 EDT

Cloud Computing is an evolution of existing technologies to deliver services to end users. Communication service providers have an early adopter opportunity to compete with new entrants, increase their bottom line and play a dominant role in delivering cloud services. Service providers have seen many so-called next- generation technology waves in the last 15 years. Cloud computing, which was seen as a new fad, has passed the initial test. Cloud computing is for real and not a vague idea anymore. It helps drive down costs for IT organizations by making infrastructure more distributed, more efficient and massively scalable. It’s being accepted by enterprises of different sizes as a smarter way to deliver services. The worldwide cloud computing market is growing fast. According to IDC, it will be a $148.8B market by 2014, of which the public cloud alone would be about $55.5B. Communication service providers (CSPs) have made a significant investment in technology, people and processes. They have customer knowledge and relationships. Public cloud computing offers a unique opportunity to CSPs to defend their hosting business and grow significantly by focusing on a much larger market than what they can do today. This article focuses on some of the areas where CSPs have an advantage over others to take the lead market share in public cloud computing.