Entries by Allan Krans, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

2019 Cloud & Software Predictions: More purchasing will be driven by intelligence rather than deployment

In 2019 customers will care less about deployment, vendors will buy more, and both sides will become more intelligent As 2018 comes to a close, it is good to look back at some of the long-standing questions that have been settled during the year: Not all workloads will move to cloud; in fact, some will […]

IBM builds out concierge services so internal IT departments can satisfy the business

TBR perspective The recent IBM Cloud Analyst Day continued a theme introduced at IBM Think 2018, with numerous IBM executives reiterating “the axis has flipped” in the market for IT solutions. Nowhere has the axis flipped more than in the relationship between IT and lines of business (LOBs). Where IT hardware and software were once […]

Oracle implores enterprises to adopt its uniquely architected cloud stack

Oracle reinforces its cloud stack to accelerate enterprise cloud adoption Oracle has a strong portfolio of cloud applications that are proving competitive in the market against more narrowly focused or less integrated SaaS competition. Oracle’s core platform and infrastructure businesses, however, are proving a harder sell, implied by financial results and qualitative context, despite significant […]

Customer preferences are forming around hybrid and shifting around open source as vendors focus on acquisitions

Prebuilt devices are a ray of clarity amid the fogginess of hybrid Hybrid can be a difficult thing to define in cloud computing. The term “hybrid” is overused by vendors but underused by customers, causing general confusion over its definition as well as solid examples of hybrid solutions. An area of the market that cuts […]

When the expected cost does not match the actual cost in cloud

In the relationship between customer and business, expectations are everything In a lot of ways, the shift to cloud computing has evened the playing field for what is expected in terms of cost, responsibilities, and the services exchanged between IT customers and providers. With cloud services, customers can experience far more of a service before […]

SaaS sweetens the cloud pot but requires vendors to up their ante to participate

Despite the simple graph in Figure 1 depicting SaaS market size, the space remains difficult to sum up. In the eyes of customers, SaaS options are proliferating and spanning a wide swath of business functions and stakeholders. Yes, SaaS is the largest segment of the “as a Service” cloud market—and yes, it will continue to […]