Three years after launching Google One, Google Cloud nears enterprise readiness with Anthos

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Google Cloud’s enterprise journey started with Diane Greene and the ‘One Google’ strategy

When Google entered the public cloud market it leveraged the company’s positive reputation among developers as well as technological expertise around machine learning and data analytics from its Search business. However, as a cloud vendor, the company had yet to establish a reputation or a business model that appealed to enterprises. Customer engagements were largely disjointed as G Suite and Google Cloud Platform were sold by different sales teams, making it cumbersome for enterprises to adopt multiple offerings within Google Cloud’s portfolio. To attract and win enterprise customers, Google Cloud hired Diane Greene as CEO in 2015 and created its “One Google” enterprise strategy in which Google Cloud planned to unify its SaaS and PaaS offerings in sales and engineering. Greene’s experience as the co-founder of VMware made her particularly qualified to lead the new strategy, but she was unable to establish the business messaging that large enterprises seek. However, Google Cloud’s value proposition to enterprises has improved over the past three years under Greene’s leadership with a degree of portfolio integration and technology advancement in areas such as machine learning, analytics and Kubernetes.

Incremental improvements are the backbone of Google Cloud’s enterprise-grade platform, Anthos

Over the past year Google Cloud’s momentum has continued to accelerate: Thomas Kurian was appointed CEO, the company partnered with large vendors such as Atos and introduced Google Cloud Services platform, which included hybrid capabilities with Google Cloud’s GKE and its new managed on-premise private cloud, GKE On-Prem. While many of these developments were noteworthy on their own, Google Cloud’s Anthos Platform, announced at Google Next in April, brings together the vendor’s technological advancements and partnerships, as well as new capabilities and infrastructure agnosticism that truly appeals to enterprises.

At its core, Anthos is a rebrand of Google Cloud Services Platform, a multicloud management toolset first announced in July 2018. In addition to GKE On-Prem’s general availability through Anthos, Google Cloud also launched Anthos Migrate, which enables customers to manage workloads running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Anthos Migrate automates the migration of virtual machines from on-premises or cloud environments into containers in GKE, which helps simplify migration to Anthos.

The ability to migrate from — or run workloads on — AWS and Microsoft IaaS in addition to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is vital to Google Cloud’s enterprise strategy, as 30% of enterprises plan to increase the number of IaaS providers in their hybrid environments over the next two years, according to TBR’s 2H18 Cloud Infrastructure & Platforms Customer Research. Further, enabling these organizations to containerize legacy applications on premises in Anthos helps alleviate virtual machine maintenance and OS patching pain points for enterprise IT departments. Migrating to Anthos also enables customers to leverage offerings such as Google Cloud AI in GCP while keeping certain workloads on premises, which is particularly beneficial for organizations facing corporate, government or industry regulations.

Google Cloud’s partner ecosystem will support, sell and augment Anthos to drive customer adoption

Because Anthos is a completely software suite, customers can deploy it on their existing hardware rather than replacing on-premises assets with new infrastructure. For customers that have existing hardware or plan to buy additional infrastructure, Google Cloud hardware partners such as Cisco, and hyperconverged infrastructure partners including Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel and Lenovo are making their offerings compatible with Anthos, enabling customers to configure or purchase the underlying hardware based on their storage, memory and performance requirements.

System integrators including Accenture, Atos, Cognizant, Deloitte, HCL Technologies, NTT DATA, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro are also developing services and solutions to provide managed services for Anthos, helping Google Cloud customers integrate Anthos into their hybrid environments. TBR expects these partners will drive adoption of Anthos, as they bring Anthos to market and sell the suite to their customer bases, helping expand Google Cloud’s addressable market.

IBM’s Kubernetes-based IBM Cloud Private offers a similar value proposition, but Google Cloud’s expertise in Kubernetes may help fend off competition from IBM, as well as Microsoft and AWS

Google Cloud’s most formidable competitor regarding Anthos is IBM and its Kubernetes-based PaaS offering IBM Cloud Private, which is gaining traction in the market as evidenced by the vendor’s 200 customer signings in 4Q18. Additionally, IBM’s tenure as a trusted enterprise provider makes the vendor a favorable choice for many organizations. However, IBM is also seen by many enterprises as a legacy on-premises provider, whereas Google Cloud is a born-in-the-cloud business with a strictly cloud-oriented business model. In the public cloud market, Google Cloud is growing at a faster rate than IBM, showcasing Google Cloud’s superior perception in the market. In addition to its improving perception among large enterprises, Google Cloud can leverage its reputation among developers to outcompete IBM in the small- to medium-enterprise space.

AWS’ Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes and Microsoft’s Azure Kubernetes Service are Kubernetes-based PaaS offerings similar to GKE, but the on-premises capabilities for each offering lag behind those of Anthos. Azure AKS will become available on Azure Stack, but the plans to create Azure AKS on Azure Stack were just announced in February. Amazon EKS can connect to Kubernetes apps running on premises, but the capabilities are more limited than those of Anthos as AWS has not yet developed an Amazon EKS on AWS Outposts. TBR expects Google Cloud will be able to fend off competition from IBM, AWS and Microsoft, as Google Cloud — as the inventor of the technology and with a network of more than 20 ISV partners with Kubernetes apps in the GCP Marketplace — has a prowess that may help swing customers in its favor.

VAR partners may not survive cloud boom: TBR

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“According to practice manager and principal analyst Allan Krans, companies that do make the change will form the largest segment of cloud partners, while those that don’t will ultimately not survive.

“However, the new breed of partner, such as those working with companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce, will need to operate in a fundamentally different manner compared with traditional partner models from the likes of Microsoft, Intel and Cisco, Krans stressed.

“’Rather than traditional IT vendors relying on partners to drive their business, in cloud those partners are on their own in many respects to identify and develop their own value-add,’” he explained.

“’Being creative, developing intellectual property and focusing on the gaps between multi-vendor solutions are much more important activities for partners in cloud programs compared with traditional ones.’”

VMware Cloud on Dell EMC bridges on-premises infrastructure

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“They will be in a complex dance to get their respective customer’s compute, storage and networking needs met,” said Ezra Gottheil, principal analyst at Technology Business Research Inc. “I think VMware has the inside track with their abstraction of the cloud over AWS’ because VMware’s abstraction doesn’t lock you into just one cloud provider.”

Do not concern yourself with quantum supremacy; the opportunity is in ‘economic advantage’

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Economic advantage is a key, repeatable milestone for quantum computing

TBR defines “economic advantage” as the point at which there is a significant benefit, either in time to insight or the ability to obtain an insight, that makes it cost-effective to pursue a given problem with the help of quantum computing. This does not mean that the benefit needs to be achieved exclusively with a quantum computer. In fact, TBR believes that initial economic advantage will be achieved by disaggregating a complex problem from classical computing to quantum computing and then back to a classical computer to maximize the cost efficiencies of gaining a given insight. Just as quantum computing will hit the market algorithm by algorithm, so will economic advantage.

It is not necessary for quantum computing to reign supreme across the IT space in order for value to be abstracted from the technology. It is also not necessary for quantum computing to take the place of a classical computer in order to provide value. This is a key factor that many vendors in the market are overlooking. Just as cloud is not all or nothing, neither is quantum computing. Cloud, as it currently exists, works in partnership with on-premises environments. In fact, customers prefer the consumption of cloud in this hybrid manner. This is a similar consumption-type model we foresee quantum computing taking, in which classical computing and quantum computing work together to fully harness the power of quantum computing.

As the prevalence of quantum computing continues to increase in the IT realm, there are many different views on the technology. Some believe the technology is so far from being relevant that it is not worth worrying about. Others believe the technology is already here, while still others believe the technology is on our doorstep and the wealth of knowledge it will release for society is almost upon us. Here is one thing we all can agree on: Quantum computing has not achieved quantum supremacy. However, TBR believes there is a far more important metric to concern ourselves with as a society that is much closer than we think: economic advantage.

Technological complexity could become a major impediment to realizing the promise and potential of 5G

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TBR perspective

The 5G ecosystem remains in a pressure cooker. There is pressure on standards bodies and their constituencies, including vendors, operators, enterprises and governments, to rush forward with technology development and hurry infrastructure into the field. There is also pressure on these same stakeholders to figure out how to not only get that gear into the field at scale but how to monetize this new infrastructure.

Though the 5G bandwagon has remained cohesive thus far, increasing technological complexity could become a major impediment to realizing the promise and potential of 5G. Additionally, increased influence by enterprises and governments is adding more complexity to the fold.

It will likely take another year for the dust to settle on the specifications for 5G NR and the 5G core, two foundational technologies for 5G networks. A key takeaway from the 5G Summit is that, despite complexity challenges, incremental progress continues to be made in the development of 5G, and the 3GPP’s Release 16 remains on track to be completed by the end of this year, fulfilling the initial promise of 5G by providing a fully stand-alone system. Release 16 will also address some of the feature limitations in the Release 15 specifications.

The sixth annual 5G Summit, which was hosted by Nokia and New York University Tandon School of Engineering in Brooklyn, provided an overview of what happened in the 5G ecosystem over the past 12 months and delivered a forward-looking view into where companies and academia think the ecosystem is headed, even out to 6G.

Be bold and get moving: PwC on risk, digital transformation and embracing data

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TBR perspective

With risk permeating every business conversation and PwC accelerating investments in digital-related offerings, including PwC Connected Solutions, which sits within its Risk and Regulatory Platform business, the firm has prepared for the next wave of opportunities. Trading on trust remains at the core, especially as the politics of data continue to disrupt PwC and its clients. Becoming customer zero keeps PwC consistent with peers, while pulling in risk differentiates, particularly against non-Big Four competitors. But the firm creates a good use case for embracing digital when it comes to managing risk. PwC’s broad spectrum of capabilities, including digital risk solutions, internal audit support, cyber and privacy advisory, due diligence, and third-party certification, add necessary dimension to its risk practice. They also help PwC protect its spot in the market as the shift to digital operations elevates the strategic importance of risk and compliance functions.

“By rethinking risk, you create confidence at scale”

Across client panels, which featured risk and IT professionals from various industries and countries, similar themes emerged, including the evolution of understanding the value of smart risk-taking (Being a smarter risk taker through digital transformation, a recent PwC paper). Additionally, panelists, attendees, and PwC risk and consulting specialists spoke of the profound shift from managing and containing risk to leveraging risk processes and profiles to build transparency and confidence in an organization and enhancing trust with customers and partners. The similarities among the professionals’ comments created layers of emphasis, particularly around trust and scale.

One client noted, “Companies that know and manage risk smartly, build trust with their customers [and] move faster themselves.” The client explained that risk management enables his company to build trust with customers faster and react to security issues more quickly than competitors. When a futurist spoke about emerging technologies and their impact on future organizations, he peppered his remarks with comments around the ethics of powerful technologies. The underlying questions: “Is the system trustworthy?” and “Can we trust the people [working those systems?]”

Scale risk management across an organization through developing talent

The PwC client who reintroduced PwC’s tagline, “by rethinking risk, you create confidence at scale” succinctly pulled together two recurring thoughts across this year’s Risk Summit: talent and digital transformation. Multiple clients and PwC professionals spoke of the importance of talent. One client stated, “The first priority is to develop talent,” even as they recognized that decreasing budgets for risk management and increasing competition for skilled IT talent resulted in pressure to expand an appreciation for risk more widely across an organization — or essentially to scale risk management practices through education and analytics-based decision making. Not surprisingly, all of these issues and opportunities fall well within the scope of PwC’s expertise.

For the second year in a row, TBR attended PwC’s annual Risk Summit, a client-centric event geared toward sharing lessons learned among client risk professionals and presenting PwC’s thinking on risk and successes to date to the analyst community. This year the summit featured multiple client panels and created a clear picture of issues most prominent in the Risk space.

Not your father’s partner programs: How vendors and partners are evolving cloud ecosystems

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Chicken or egg first? For partner programs, that makes a big difference

As Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) created the modern computing era in the 1990s, partner programs were at the forefront. The success of these companies and the distributed computing era in general was largely built on the backs of technology and distribution partners. In fact, these companies still rely on partners to drive a majority of their revenue today. The same cannot be said for the cloud era of IT, which was led by the direct sales strategies of top vendors such as Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) and Amazon Web Services (AWS; Nasdaq: AMZN). These two vendors became leaders in their respective cloud markets by selling directly to customers, bypassing distribution partners altogether. Partners are certainly playing a larger role now, but the timing does impact their position in the value chain for cloud. Without a well-defined value-add in the self-service, transactional and passive sales strategies for cloud, partners are forced to create or carve out activities that are both unaddressed by the cloud provider and hold value for the end customer. Rather than traditional IT vendors relying on partners to drive their business, in cloud those partners are on their own in many respects to identify and develop their own value-add. Being creative, developing intellectual property and focusing on the gaps between multivendor solutions are much more important activities for partners in cloud programs compared with traditional ones.

Partners may look the same, but are in fact quite different

“What does a cloud partner look like?” was a common question as these new cloud-centric programs came to be. It was unclear if a new startup class of born-on-the-cloud partners would come into existence, or if the existing stock of VAR, distributor, MSP, systems integration (SI) and hosting partners would eventually transform their businesses to align with the new cloud business opportunities. As shown in Figure 1, the types of partners participating in new cloud programs is just the first category of changes programs are undergoing. As the answer to what type of partners are needed for these programs comes into view, it is looking like a little bit of the former and a lot of the latter. Cloud-native partners that are focused on consulting, managed services, intellectual property development and cloud solution integration hold a small but important space in the market. The difficult thing for vendors is that there are not very many of these newly formed partners, and to make matters worse, many are being acquired. It is also difficult to spur their creation or fit them into a traditional partner program. While traditional partners are cattle that can be controlled and herded in a consistent direction, cloud-native partners are wilder animals that create, forge and follow their own path. In terms of existing partners changing to focus on cloud solutions, that, too, is a difficult task. The truth is that many traditional VAR-type partners, focused on reselling and implementation activities, may not survive the transition to cloud solutions. Part of this is generationally driven, as many of the baby boomer-owned partner businesses lack the incentive to adapt their business model with retirement looming. Many of these partners will ride the slow decline of traditional IT opportunity until eventually closing their doors. Those traditional partners that do make the transition to a more cloud-focused business model will compose the largest segment of cloud partners. While they may keep the same name, these partners will be operating in a fundamentally different manner compared with traditional partner models.

Informatica adds intelligence to data management but faces unusual competition as traditional roles blur

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The Customer Data Management landscape

Informatica continues to thrive in its position as an agnostic third-party data management vendor that supports enterprises’ applications and data initiative. This approach has served Informatica well, as tailored solutions such as Customer 360 have complemented and supported leading front-office applications like Salesforce with customer data management. As front-office application vendors innovate to challenge Salesforce for market share, many are building customer data platforms that enhance the information feeding these applications and build a case for full-suite sales across front-office touch points. Among this competition, there is also a driving need to build greater insight and intelligence into customer data. Informatica’s acquisition of AllSight greatly strengthens the intelligence it can deliver around its clients’ customer data, but applications-led vendors will increasingly challenge Informatica in the customer data management space as they look to build out their value propositions.

Unifying and adding intelligence around customer data is a ubiquitous priority

Vendors across the cloud-based and traditional software landscapes want to elevate the value they provide customers and increase their addressable market by prioritizing unified and intelligent data to power enterprises. Data efforts are following the same workloads trends as cloud applications, focusing on CRM first before HCM and ERP to build traction in the market.

Applications-led vendors such as Salesforce, Oracle, SAP and Adobe are leveraging the data their individual sales, marketing, customer support and commerce applications generate and consume. This allows vendors to craft partnerships, new solutions and data model transformations to unify and enrich the data across all discrete application areas. The message shapes up to enable an enterprise to equip all front-office functions with a single and complete depiction of each customer or prospect that tracks and contextualizes actions at every point of the customer life cycle. In the last nine months we’ve seen numerous developments along these lines, including:

  • SAP announced the unification of its customer experience applications into a single suite, C/4HANA, with plans for deep integrations and layers of intelligence.
  • Adobe, Microsoft and SAP announced their alliance under the Open Data Initiative to give joint clients a more comprehensive view of their customers by enriching data across each vendor’s front-office applications.
  • Salesforce announced Customer 360 to update records across its systems with new information via a unique customer identifier.
  • Oracle announced CX Unity as a data platform that unifies data across Oracle and partner front-office applications to provide a comprehensive view of engagement points and additional data intelligence.
  • Salesforce announced intentions to offer a customer data platform to store a unified profile of customers.
  • Adobe announced a customer data platform.
  • Adobe and Microsoft expanded their relationship, launching new tools and leveraging data from LinkedIn to provide purchasing insights for B2B sales and marketing.

TBR Weekly Preview: April 29-May 3

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Two weeks in a row cranking out tons of analysis around technology companies, their strategies and performances, and how we see the market changing constantly. As always, connect directly with the analysts if you have questions.

Monday

  • In TBR’s 1Q19 Fujitsu Cloud Initial Response, we discuss Fujitsu’s strategy and next moves after its decision last October to stop international sales of K5. An increasingly strategic partnership with Microsoft coupled with continued enhancements to its data center and managed services businesses and capabilities will be ever more critical to the vendor’s long-term success outside Japan. — Cassandra Mooshian, Senior Analyst, Cloud and Software Team

Tuesday

  • In TBR’s 1Q19 Alphabet (Google) Initial Response, we track Alphabet’s ability to supplement core advertising revenue with sales of its Hardware products, Cloud services and YouTube subscriptions, as well as its investments in original and licensed video content that have begun to pressure margins. Alphabet’s Other Bets also comes into focus as the company leverages investments in the businesses within this segment, such as Waymo autonomous driving, Verily life sciences and Wing drone delivery, to create revenue streams that are sustainable over the long term. — Michael Soper, Senior Analyst, Telecom Team
  • Leidos begins 2019 with a renewed focus on growth and continued robust activity within its public sector healthcare business. TBR’s 1Q19 Leidos Initial Response will highlight two new collaborations to illustrate the increasing strategic importance of healthcare in Leidos’ revamped growth strategy, as well as updates on the company’s ongoing consolidation of its physical assets in the U.S. and expansion of its footprint in the U.K. — John Caucis, Senior Analyst, Professional Services Team
  • Digital marketing services (DMS) remains a growth opportunity — expected to reach $132 billion by 2023 — as CX-related content deployment advances to maturity. In TBR’s 2Q19 Digital Transformation Insights Report: DMS, TBR benchmarks 19 vendors that are well positioned to increase their share of the addressable DMS market, which on average expanded in revenue 22% year-to-year in 4Q18, through 2023.— Boz Hristov,Senior Analyst, Professional Services Team

Wednesday

  • In TBR’s 1Q19 Apple Initial Response, we will report on Apple’s efforts to shift toward a more services-oriented model as it combats slower product revenue due to lengthening smartphone ownership cycles and global saturation. While Apple’s extensive ecosystem puts it into a strong position to enter the vast content services ecosystem, the company will have to navigate busy service and content markets and overcome experienced and embedded competitors, such as Netflix, Amazon and Spotify. — Daniel Callahan, Analyst, Devices and IoT Team 

Thursday

  • With nearly $1 billion in new acquisitions in 1Q19, M&A is once again taking center stage in CACI’s overall growth strategy, enabling the company to align well with shifting defense and intelligence priorities emphasizing agile solution development, accelerated acquisitions cycles, and advanced communications and security products for warfighting and intelligence missions.  TBR will have in-depth analysis of CACI’s most recent acquisitions to expand its portfolio of cyber, electronic warfare and communications intelligence capabilities in our 1Q19 CACI Initial Response. — John Caucis, Senior Analyst, Professional Services Team

Friday

  • Cognizant’s strategic framework is in place, enabling the company to capture and accelerate digital opportunities. The recent acquisition of Meritsoft, which will add SaaS capabilities to its Digital Operations arsenal, reaffirms Cognizant’s commitment to digital and will help the company expand its digital platforms within its addressable market. — Kelly Lesiczka, Analyst, Professional Services Team 
  • Steady expansion of the number of clients in Tata Consultancy Services’ (TCS) largest segments illustrates the continued traction of TCS’ Business 4.0 framework, designed to drive digital enablement. TBR’s 1Q19 TCS report will discuss hiring trends and margin projections during the remainder of 2019. — Kevin Collupy, Analyst, Professional Services Team
  • As Infosys evolves its value proposition and go-to-market strategy, investments in AI, cloud and design thinking remain at the forefront of company executives’ agenda. A recent uptick in performance, evidenced by the healthy pipeline of large deals the company signed in FY19 for a total contract value of $6.28 billion, gives Infosys the confidence to invest and tout capabilities in new areas to secure long-term growth through product-enabled services. Doubling down on its position on the services supply side through investments in innovative portfolio offerings could help Infosys solidify its standing as a trusted outsourcer as it converts bookings to cash.
  • — Boz Hristov, Senior Analyst, Professional Services Team

This week TBR will also publish several special reports on recent analyst events, including PwC’s Risk Summit and EY’s annual analyst event.

TIS market returns to positive growth as key operators accelerate and broaden 5G build-out plans

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TIS market returns to growth …

According to Technology Business Research, Inc.’s (TBR) Telecom Infrastructure Services Global Market Forecast 2018-2023, the telecom infrastructure services (TIS) market has returned to a positive growth trajectory through the forecast period after several years of declines, now that the 5G cycle is underway and webscales continue to increase their spend on network technologies to drive their strategic initiatives. Leading operators globally have accelerated their 5G timelines by up to two years, and this has correspondingly pulled forward the TIS market growth curve by two years. 2018 was a key year where leading operators invested to prepare their networks for 5G and, in some cases, began deploying 5G technology. This trend will play out over at least the next five years as operators build out their 5G networks and continue their transformational journeys toward becoming digital service providers.

… but growth rate suppressed by offsetting factors

Offsetting factors that will constrain the rate of TIS market growth include the shift to more efficient network architectures (NFV/SDN and cloud); the decommissioning of legacy infrastructure; the increasing use of network resource pooling, such as network sharing; and operator consolidation.

Professional services will be the fastest-growing services segment through the forecast period

Increasing technology and business model complexity will drive demand for a broad range of professional services through the forecast period. Leading operators will continue their journeys toward evolving into digital service providers, and this will require the full spectrum of professional services, from consulting to systems integration. Operators will increasingly rely on the vendor community for assistance, requiring expertise, staff augmentation and access to intellectual property, or a combination off all three, as they pursue digital transformation.

TBR’s Telecom Infrastructure Services Global Market Forecast provides annual analysis and forecasting of the deployment, maintenance, professional services and managed services markets for network and IT suppliers.