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Cloud Billing Quirks
Cloud billing is a widely accepted challenge in the industry – mostly because there are many business models, complexities around infrastructure and customers and resellers to support. Here I look at some cloud billing quirks.
Problem
Many service providers are using their own home grown or cobbled together billing system as a direct result of quirky business models. And as a result, most of the time, the business model doesn’t fit into off the shelf billing solutions. The problem is that a quirky billing model does not support growth, complex business models or reseller programs. So what’s the solution?
Solution
Well for starters, cloud providers need a way to customize billing capabilities without becoming software engineers. They need to avoid creating billing capabilities that are unsupported so that changes in the business plan cause more investment in billing software development. They also need to ensure the billing solution is easily extended, integrated and modified to suit individual customers without creating additional unsupported systems.
Let’s consider some use cases:
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator 3.1 Summed Up in One Word
Today we released Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator 3.1. It is another major step forward in our mission to offer service providers, hosters and telcos with a cloud management solution to create a cloud business customers love.
What’s it all about? If I were to sum this release up in one word it would be FLEXIBILITY. It always serves as the cornerstone of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator’s design, but all the 3.1 improvements continue to offer more flexibility and extensibility. The latter is all about the ease with which we and others can extend the functionality of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator to third parties.
It is our mission to deliver the most flexible cloud management and orchestration solution available to allow service providers and hosting companies to quickly and easily get to market to provide the services their customers are demanding, while still allowing each business to differentiate. Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator 3.1 is another key step in that direction.
What’s in the release? In addition to the press release, here is a snapshot summary:
Seeking Alpha Says IBM: A Disaster In The Making
I was reading an article on the Seeking Alpha website about IBM’s big problem. The author Arne Alsin, said:
[IBM’s] operating model is built around selling on-premise computing – including so-called “private clouds” – but the $3.6 trillion IT industry is moving at an accelerating pace in an entirely different direction, to the public cloud, which is a low-margin utility model.
He quotes a few prominent C-level executives:
- Adrian Cockcroft, CTO of Netflix (NFLX) said, “there is zero revenue for traditional IT” in the public cloud.
- Salesforce.com (CRM) CEO Marc Benioff said, “IBM needs to sell a box, and the cloud is not a box.”
And while these businesses are built on public cloud offers, the proof is in the pudding. These guys are expanding and growing at rapid pace. So what’s the problem with IBM? Well it is a classic behavioral problem. IBM needs to become a completely different animal, but all of its processes, resources and values are aligned to selling tin, software and services directly to the enterprise.
451 Group’s Liam Eagle Discusses VPS and Beyond in Upcoming Webinar
Next Thursday, May 16, 2013, Liam Eagle, analyst at 451 Research Group covering the Internet infrastructure business, will join Flexiant Founder and Product Champion, Tony Lucas in a webinar that will explore the strengths and benefits of moving from VPS to an IaaS platform. Register Now!
Flexiant and 451 Research discuss the service provider path from VPS to IaaS
May 16 2013 at 11AM EDT/ 4PM BST
This webinar comes as part of our on-going VPS and Beyond series which so far has explored:
- VPS versus Infrastructure as a Service: The definitions, differences and market opportunity
- Why IaaS: How IaaS can solve service providers and customers VPS problems and the capabilities necessary to reap these benefits
The Future of Data Center Automation
Any data center manager can sympathize with this situation – it is 3:00 a.m., and you’ve just been notified that one of your customer’s servers is down. Unfortunately, that means you’re probably not going to get much more sleep tonight. You head into the data center and spend the next few hours sitting on the floor in between the racks, unable to solve the problem. Doesn’t it always seem that the later the hour, the more stubborn the server?
And, if it isn’t servers failing in the middle of the night, it is users expecting resources to be provisioned for them immediately. Or, just as significantly, users’ resources can sit unused due to hardware silos or resource sprawl. With some requiring an increase in resources and others with wasted resources to spare, shouldn’t there be a way to allocate them based on actual requirement? Using the cloud should eliminate the guesswork in these situations.
Unfortunately, these situations remain far too common even with the advancements in the cloud. Every data center manager around the world is calling out for an innovation that can keep a data center running without manual intervention at every stage in the provisioning process. What is needed is simple: increased automation. However, automation is not easy to build and can take a great deal of time if done from the ground up.
Dell Buys Fellow Cloud Management Cool Vendor, Enstratius
Yesterday, Dell announced the acquisition of Enstratius, an enterprise cloud-management software and services provider that delivers single and multi-cloud management capabilities. As a fellow Gartner Cool Vendor this year in the 2013 Cloud Management report, we want to congratulate Enstratius.
This acquisition is proof that the biggest IT companies in the world recognize that they need to help their clients quickly deliver cloud solutions and that long, expensive development projects are no longer viable (if they ever were). They also need a cloud solution that can easily manage both infrastructure and applications. These companies are not developing, but acquiring the technology. Only in March did Oracle announce it had agreed to acquire Nimbula, a 2012 Gartner Cool Vendor and provider of private cloud infrastructure management software.
If You Haven’t Heard, Flexiant is Cool
Alongside our customers and partners, we have been shouting about our status as Gartner Cool Vendor in Cloud Management Report for 2013.
I think it’s important for all the people reading this to fully understand what it means to be a Cool Vendor. Describing the purpose of Cool Vendor, Research VP, Michelle Cantara said that the Cool Vendor is a smaller, lesser known vendor, but that provides innovative technology or services. The reason for Cool Vendor reports is to give attention to vendors doing groundbreaking things that are innovative or different to provide some leading indicators of what is coming. Cantara said:
“If you are an end-user, reading a Cool Vendor report gives you the barometer of what might change in the kinds of technologies or services that you are consuming, what you need to do in the next 3-5 years.”
“If you are an investor, the reason to look at a Cool Vendor is to understand what might be the breakout technologies.”
You can download the Gartner report and I would encourage you to do so, but in addition, here are some quotes that I think really stand out and some comments on these.
Paul Burns at Neovise Interviews Tony Lucas
As Paul Burns puts it in his podcast, he is joined by the ‘product guy’ at Flexiant. Our very own Tony Lucas spent some time with Paul at Cloud Connect in California. In the 15 minute podcast, Tony offered his opinions on:
• New entrants and existing players – why established companies that could not or cannot innovate are either not around anymore or won’t be in the future
• Competitive dynamics and strategies – Tony talks about geographic reach and scalability as important factors, but actually the breadth of services actually being offered is a point of differentiation. Customers don’t want to just buy bandwidth and CPU. They want value added services – monitoring, systems management, database as a services. Customers should look at their service provider as a partner, not just a cost-center. Tony’s view is that this is key for service providers.
• Differentiation versus low cost – Tony highlighted that there are two sides to differentiation, one on a technical level and the other on service levels with regard to billing, support, latency, locality etc. You can also get a copy of the white paper Tony mentions on this topic here.
Listen to the podcast. We also think Paul’s a great guy and would suggest you check out the Paul Burns blog.
Third Annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey
In collaboration with North Bridge, an early-stage venture capital firm, GigaOM and 55 other collaborators, we are supporting the third annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey. The 2013 survey results promise to reveal the key changes in respondents’ perceptions and plans in relation to cloud implementation.
Last year’s survey results were summarized in a slideshare and highlighted a few key lessons:
Click here to take this year’s survey to see how things have changed. We would encourage contributions from any cloud industry experts as well as users and vendors of cloud software, support and services.
The Cost of Cloud
Yesterday I read an article on Forbes, ‘Do You Replace Your Server Or Go To The Cloud? The Answer May Surprise You’ which debated whether small businesses are, or should be moving to the cloud. That’s a debate that spurs a lot of back and forth that I think will continue. Regardless, the point I found extremely interesting was about the cost of cloud.
Contributor, Gene Marks, said:
Things were getting to a breaking point, and all six of my clients decided it was time for a change. So they all moved to cloud, right?
Nope. None of them did. None of them chose the cloud. Why? Because all six of these small business owners and managers came to the same conclusion: it was just too expensive. Sorry media. Sorry tech world. But this is the truth. This is what’s happening in the world of established companies.
He then went on to do the math after evaluating cloud based hosting services from Amazon, Microsoft and Rackspace and found that the services would be about $100 per month per user. With 20 users, that is $2,000 per month, $24,000 per year. The article went on to show that the cost of buying a server and hiring an IT person was still cheaper.
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