ITIL the cornerstone of decent cloud services

ITIL has been around for about 10 years now and was the best practice for the IT operations. Many years it has been seen as something new with the goal of imoroving productivity, quality of service and reduce costs.

As the ICT industry is transfroming itself through the cloud, ITIL becomes more and more a toolset and is a minumum requirement to build a decent cloud service.

Cloudplatforms embed ITIL into the IT service, automating all processes of a cloud Service Lifecycle into a Cloud orchetsration platform.

All aspects of ITIL are faced when building and delivering Cloud Services. From service conception, over service transition and delivery, problem and change management until service decommisioning.

　

In fact Cloud Service are about 20% to do with technology and anout 80% with automating all ITIL processes.

This implies more people with ITIl based skills in IT organizations which can implement service catalogs, define ITIL processes and learn how to deal with capaticy management, more than setting up servers, as this is done automatically in the cloud.

Supprized ? I am not.

BYOC

The summer holidays brought, besides a well-deserved break, also back an old hobby of mine, which is playing around with microcontrollers… It was a while ago and I must say a lot changed since last time…

The term BYOC got a new dimension for me this summer. Instead of ‘Buy your own computer’ or device, why not just build it…, especially when the price is as low as $25 …

More than a year ago, I saw some posts about the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is low cost single chip PC made by the university of Cambridge, where they had the idea to build a low cost computer mainly for education purposes, based on a Linux OS. After some delay in production, they managed to start delivering it as from beginning 2012. The delivery in the beginning was a problem as a lot of people where waiting to order one (I suspect they used the same strategy as apple, as the production was low in the beginning and the demand higher than expected, it created even more attention…, it certainly worked for me J )

I managed to get hold on one in May, because of lack-of –time; it was waiting on me until the second part of my holiday.

After walking through some forums and docs, I managed to put a Linux image on it and in less than 1 hour my TV became an internet browser. I read already some positive things about it, but still I was amazed by how easy it was to make it work. Soon the device was taken over by my kids... so I was thinking about the possibilities this device bring us.

Already working with thin client infrastructure such as citric technology as from ’97, I stayed a fan of the thin-client concept, even up to now… So I was wondering if I could not turn this into a Thin-Client device. As a matter of fact the only thing what is missing is the Citrix receiver on it.

Before I started to think how to put a Linux Citrix client on it, I started googeling looking if someone out there had maybe the same idea. And yes, I found some links about Raspberry Pi Thin client project (

http://rpitc.blogspot.be/2012/03/raspberry-pi-citrix-client.html) .

AS Service provider we deliver a shared Citrix XenApp infrastructure environment to customers, so within less than 30 minutes I managed to prep the Raspberry Pi and fire off a Windows desktop on it.

Not only did is support HTTPS and CAG Web interface connection without any doubt (which is not always the case for the commercial Thin clients J ), it also performed amazing well. I try to post some you tubes later on…

This opens new perspectives… I can’t wait to put my Windows 8 VDI on it… The only thing that is missing is a nice case around it, 3d printing will do the job…

So the term BYOC stands from now on for 'BUILD YOUR OWN PC !'

Office 365 versus Microsoft Hosting Providers

Is Microsoft Office365, the successor of BPOS,  going to replace the Microsoft Hosting solution of existing Service providers ? I don’t think so…

Office365 is the successor of BPOS (Microsoft’s Business Productivity suite). The Office365 suite tends to have a more success as the BPOS suite, which certainly in Europe did not break any records. Office365 is built on better products, supporting real multi-tenancy . Not only the exchange offering but also the Sharepoint and Lync are now fully cloud services at a very interesting price.

So why is Office365 not going to replace the Microsoft offerings from existing hosting providers ?

Well first-of-all, organization still base their choice of products and service on advice from their partners. Don’t forget that a lot of customers candidate of collaboration cloud solutions are not IT –aware and they follow in most cases the advice of their ‘current’ IT partners.

As the Office365 business model is still mostly built on a commission based model (except for the happy few which could sign up for an aggregation contract) IT partners will tend to go for a model which gives the complete control, thus also the financial, of their customers.

Second, The Office365 offering only delivers a part of an IT solution for small and medium businesses.  For a large group of them, once they have made up their mind to move to the cloud, they also want to outsource the rest of their IT demands into the cloud.  Solutions such our CloudPlaza brokerage cloud allow customer to outsource their complete IT demand into the cloud with integrated security. This  is not possible with just Office365. Even if customers start-off with Office365, they will migrate to fully managed service providers in the future.

Third reason has to do with functionality and availability. Office365 is on it’s own a great product but have some limitations. The version for small and medium enterprises only allows to send e-mails towards maximum 500 recipients ! This could be a problem for them. Also Microsoft demand that you migrate your DNS management to them, but what if you have important websites or e-commerce ? do you want do depend on them for your DNS records ?

We see Office365 more as an enables then as a competitor. The sales and Marketing of Microsoft will help customers take the move to the cloud. Customers will want more from the cloud which drives them to solutions such as our CloudPlaza Borkerage cloud, which is made for, and supported by, our partners, delivering the same services as they are used to do, the only difference is the way how it is done and invoiced.