The New Year brings new enterprise cloud offerings from several businesses. These new offerings are aimed at getting companies to switch their applications over to the cloud. The expanded infrastructure offered from IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) will bring together data services from around the world, including; Canada, Brazil, Japan, Australia and France, as well as in the United States and Germany.
A data centre is planned to be opened in Spain this year as well.
Enterprise Applications
It has been stressed that the new infrastructure will allow apps like SAP to be run through the cloud. When attempting to run critical applications through the cloud, there is a need for extreme technical expertise, tight security, ongoing maintenance, as well as customer service around the clock.
Some of the services that are now being provided for enterprises include SAP Business Object and SAP business suite. These are available throughout the world with a fully managed platform service for running it while in production.
Choosing one of the larger vendors for your enterprise cloud solutions services may be beneficial as they have a staff that will fully understand your needs. However, it may be a good idea to wait a bit before jumping into their cloud services as most of the products are still being tested.
What is Available Now?
IBM plans to spend the next year and a half working through a transition to OpenStack in order to run their cloud services. There seems to be some maturity problems with the operating system as they have started to discuss their plans without it being in place.
Oracle has stated that they will be introducing new social, storage and computing cloud services during the first part of 2013. Oracle already offers HR, ERP, customer services and several other products through the cloud and that there are messaging, computing and storage services currently in beta-testing phases. In addition, the company has offered a private cloud service for their enterprise consumers within the past month.
Enterprises that are currently ready to begin using enterprise cloud offerings have several options. Some of the current leaders in these offerings may not have the best possible support for the enterprise system. However, it seems that the future of the cloud is bright and many enterprises will find benefits in using this type of service for all of their technological needs and services.
While there are some businesses that have been waiting and watching the larger traditional companies such as Oracle and IBM to get serious about using the cloud, there are some other vendors that have launches scheduled within the year. One of the ‘smaller’ vendors that is planning to launch cloud services is Dell.
It is important to consider the pricing models that are being offered by the larger vendors as there may be some designed as a way to protect the legacy of the businesses. Choosing an enterprise vendor that is more traditional increases the chances of actually working with a company that has people on staff who fully understand the needs of the enterprise.
