Why Hybrid Cloud Is the New Black

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Loraine Lawson.

Darren Cunningham, vice president of marketing for Informatica Cloud, told IT Business Edge’s Loraine Lawson that private clouds are unusual and likely to stay that way as companies continue to focus on connecting internal resources with the public cloud. That will make hybrid clouds the most common type of deployment. To deal with this shift, CIOs need to think about offering what Cunningham calls “hybrid IT.”

Lawson: What’s Informatica doing in terms of hybrid cloud?

Cunningham: We’re going to be talking more about hybrid IT, because if you start talking about hybrid cloud, you’re getting into the specific definition of public-private hybrid, community, some of the NIST definition of cloud computing. This is part of the whole cloud-first initiative when the U.S. government talked about how they were going to go cloud first…

What we tend to talk mostly about is this new reality of hybrid IT, where IT has to figure out how to deliver cloud applications, cloud infrastructure that is integrated with their legacy environment. So really it’s a mix of private, community and public clouds — it’s all clouds. In our definition of hybrid IT, we’re talking more about cloud computing and on-premise applications and platforms.

If you think about Amazon, they have primarily a public cloud infrastructure, but now they have a virtual private cloud and they’re sort of blurring the line between being able to offer some private capabilities. Amazon is starting to compete more against Rackspace and some of the other hosting providers that have been the more traditional public cloud infrastructure platforms.

Most of what we’ve been doing has been focused on integrating software-as-a-service applications and delivering data integration as a software as a service or a platform as a service. So I would categorize it as a public cloud offering in that our repository is publicly hosted and so forth. Most of the use cases we’re doing today are still integrating SaaS applications with on-premise systems. We’re starting to do some more cloud-to-cloud, like a Salesforce to NetSuite type of use case, but more often than not, it’s help me integrate all these proliferating SaaS apps with the existing back-office applications and databases.

One of the big areas of opportunity and growth for cloud integration is embedded, ISV-type of opportunities. If you look at MicroStrategy, they announced MicroStrategy Cloud and there’s really two flavors of it. There’s a full-blown hosted BI stack, and in that stack, Informatica PowerCenter is part of the offering. They’ll go into a big IT shop and say, “We can outsource your BI, we’ve got PowerExcel, we’ve got Informatica, we’ve got this whole stack. Let’s just work with you,” and it’s like a managed service hosted. Then they also have Informatica Cloud running as part of a more subscription-based offering and they’re working on going down market with a lighter-weight BI toolset to compete against QlikTech and others that are doing well in that space.

I only bring that up because I think you’re seeing that ISVs need to be able to deliver both. Because we’ve focused on delivering integration as a service, we’ve figured out the business model, we’ve figured out how to deliver a multi-tenant offering, and it’s very interoperable with our core platform, we can uniquely offer both.

Lawson: Are companies really pursuing private cloud?

Cunningham: If you’re Salesforce.com, you say that private cloud is like a unicorn, it doesn’t really exist and it’s everyone liking the benefits of cloud computing but feeling like there’s too much risk in terms of security and data privacy and those sorts of things. At Oracle Open World, I had several enterprise architects come up to me and say there’s two things I want to talk about: cloud computing and Big Data. And I said, so you’re an enterprise architect and you’re trying to figure out a blueprint for your company? Absolutely.

When it comes to cloud, one guy went so far as to say, “We will not do any public cloud in our company. It’s going to be 100 percent private.” And then you ask him are there any SaaS applications in your business? “Oh, yeah, they’re all over the place.” Well, good luck, right? Good luck shutting all that down and going 100 percent private, it’s just not going to happen. That’s why I think it is going to be a mix. It is going to be hybrid, whether it’s public-private, whether it’s cloud and on-premise. Hybrid is the new black.

Lawson: Are companies already pursuing hybrid cloud?

Cunningham: It’s really starting to resonate.

We did a program recently with our sales organization and we said, “Hey we’re looking at some global programs for next year, one of which we wanted to do around cloud computing.” The feedback we actually got from sales was it’s not so much cloud computing as hybrid IT. “Help me go in to my customers and talk about how they can get the best of both worlds — how they can take advantage of cloud apps and platforms and a mixture of the Informatica platform can help keep it all unified and centralized and so forth.”

So one of the use cases we’ve seen is for a few years we were selling on the edge of the enterprise — we were selling to departments, underserved divisions, business groups who didn’t want to have to wait for it. There’s a lot of departmental IT groups who are IT, but not necessarily working with centralized IT, where Informatica is well established. So we’re seeing the pendulum swing back to these groups trying to deliver some element of self-service without pain.

For example, if you are an Informatica customer running the core PowerCenter platform, the core Informatica technology, one of the uses cases we’ve seen is around the ICC. So the Integration Competency Center saying, “Hey, there’s a lot of smaller lighter weight requirements in the departments and division.” They don’t necessarily need the full scope of Informatica or maybe the Informatica team is busy doing other things. So they might go and buy open source or some other less-governed or less-certified tools.

We have this concept of a hierarchy where you can have one central group managing permissions and then spin out a sub-Informatica Cloud instance to say a sales group or a different department. We’re starting to see this idea that you can give them the Informatica cloud service and, because it’s fully interoperable, if you build a job and you’re running them out in different groups, you can always bring those back into the centralized group or you can build more complex things with PowerCenter and deploy them out to the edges of Informatica cloud.

One other example is we’ve partnered with NetSuite and we’re starting to see SaaS vendors go down this route where NetSuite is talking about two-tier ERP. They’re not going to try to take SAP head on. They’re going to say, “SAP is going to be your system of record, the mother ship if you will, but you probably don’t want to buy a whole bunch more of R3, so why not use NetSuite in the divisions or the satellites or different departments of your company and then use Informatica to sync up with SAP.”

We’re starting to see the same idea with integration. It’s kind of a two-tier integration where they’re using Informatica’s core platform for the heavy lifting, and then they can deploy out to Informatica cloud for some other use cases that may be lighter weight or may be app-to-app, point-to-point-style of integration.