{"id":5271,"date":"2022-12-05T12:00:30","date_gmt":"2022-12-05T12:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/?p=5271"},"modified":"2022-12-05T12:00:30","modified_gmt":"2022-12-05T12:00:30","slug":"reinvent-becomes-reposition_120522","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/reinvent-becomes-reposition_120522\/","title":{"rendered":"re:Invent or re:Position? AWS tries to \u2018out Google\u2019 Google on the importance of your data strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As HFS reflects on last week’s AWS re:Invent event, it becomes increasingly clear that the firm could lose steam as the migration to the cloud, as a technology platform, gives way to the cloud\u2019s role in making data a business asset.<\/p>\n
While AWS’ growth numbers are still holding up, there could be significant changes on the horizon as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) makes up lost ground with its approach to a data-centric cloud environment.\u00a0 In addition, cool kids on the block like Snowflake and Databricks are changing the narrative from commodity cloud to data-driven cloud.<\/p>\n
The fact that AWS forced HFS to digest these proceedings online speaks volumes for AWS’ preference to have only analysts in-person who will sing their praises, repeat their rhetoric, and refrain from challenging them. Why risk analysts who dare to talk to enterprises and question the logic of where (and why) they are spending vast amounts of their money with a half-baked cloud vision?<\/p>\n
AWS continues to cash in by bolstering its commodity cloud offerings and pouring funds into a morass of new products. The result is the significant complexity for enterprise customers to navigate this portfolio and piles pressure on them to seek out increased support from partners with both domain and data experience.<\/p>\n
Our research shows that migrating to the cloud is costing enterprises many billions a year, and that cost continues to rise as many enterprises move too fast and fail to fix their underlying data infrastructures.\u00a0 Throw in the massive wage hikes, attrition and skills shortages in the tech space, and the cost of migrating your critical data into the cloud becomes unconscionable, especially at a time when most CFOs are freezing spending in anticipation of a very challenging economic period.<\/p>\n
Net-net, you can\u2019t migrate processes and workflows that don\u2019t<\/em> get you the data you need until you\u2019ve fixed<\/em> them first. If you move your existing crap into the cloud, you end up with even worse crap, and you just wasted a lot of time and money in the bargain.\u00a0 And you don’t even need to survey what enterprise buyers are spending – you just need to examine the huge growth numbers enjoyed by the majority of consultants and IT services providers in recent years, cashing in on rushed and poorly prepared cloud migrations.<\/p>\n The move away from \u201call in on hyperscalers\u201d is more a threat to AWS\u2019s bottom line than it is to either of its notable competitors, Azure or Google Cloud, as hosting data, facilitating compute, and managing web storage is now a commodity whose costs-to-ROI is being questioned (although nicely) not as the \u201cmove to the cloud\u201d but the \u201cmove to hybrid.\u201d<\/p>\n As noted in HFS\u2019s recent Cloud Native Transformation Horizons study<\/a>, \u201cThe buy side is struggling to capture the value of their cloud investments, as very few enterprise customers have a well-defined cloud transformation strategy at an organizational level, which can lead to transformations done in silos.\u201d <\/em>The results are showing that less than 50% of cloud native transformations are a success…<\/p>\n The \u201cCloud\u201d is quickly becoming a commodity platform. Adopting a cloud-native mindset is about leveraging multi and hybrid cloud solutions to deliver business outcomes, empowering employees, customers and partners, all the while managing costs. While AWS is the current leader in the hyperscaler market, it’s clearly feeling the pressure as GCP closes the gap.<\/p>\n HFS has repeatedly been documenting the importance of data. From \u201cforget apps, it’s about the data<\/a>\u201d to a view on \u201cdata is your strategy<\/a>,\u201d and on modernization, there are many articles where we\u2019ve done deep dives into the importance of data, automation, analysis, visualization, implementation, governance, and partnering to deliver results. We firmly believe that data is crucial to building, maintaining, and growing a robust, resilient ecosystem.<\/p>\n In fact, we flagged this in our HFS Pulse data from early 2021, where Global 2000 firms cited databases as the top workload being moved to the cloud:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n To be a truly autonomous<\/em> organization that operates in the cloud, the principles of OneOffice hold truer than ever: workflows need to execute in real-time between customers and employees – and engage partners in your ecosystem. OneOffice is about understanding and discovering the data<\/em> you must have to win in your market – right now in real-time – as the market environment keeps changing.<\/p>\n Google has been an advocate of data for years and tied this theme from their data center to Google Apps used by millions of firms. Yet, if a vendor (ahem, AWS) believes they can win<\/em> with data, they really must improve how they tell their story if they want to expand their services and revenue opportunities further. And this is where we see GCP closing in fast on AWS \u2013 hence the attempt at re:Invent in which AWS attempted to re:Position<\/em> itself as a data leader as well, which is so critical to the datacycle that drives OneOffice:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Moving data into the cloud has to be both<\/em> a business transformation and a technical exercise.\u00a0 You can’t keep separating the worlds of business and IT any longer if you want your workflows to be executed autonomously in the cloud. Business executives must identify the data they need to be effective in making decisions and work with their IT counterparts to build a data structure that can be effectively migrated and operated in a cloud environment:<\/p>\n Connecting data workloads across multi and hybrid clouds, cloud data warehouses, data lakes, and applications is the world we live in. the orchestration of these is crucial and a focal point of projects from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to Kubernetes.<\/p>\n While both firms are active in the CNCF and have solutions that support K8S, AWS is the more clunky of the two. To be successful, data must flow across internet, storage, and servers; thus, the configuration must be simple to implement and maintain. AWS growth is its own weakness here as tools like managing IP domains to microservices, containers, and Kubernetes are being driven by Google\u2019s efforts ahead of AWS.<\/p>\n The orchestration of data is a prime example. With regards to orchestration, the EKS (AWS version of Kubernetes) has been considered so poor that firms like Red Hat have come to their customer rescue with Red Hat Open Shift for AWS (ROSA). AWS continues to improve its EKS, but it is substantially behind GCP and its customers are leaning on third parties to deliver these solutions.<\/p>\n AWS is the first to market leader. Our hat is off down for the efforts they put into developing the hyperscaler market. But as the pioneer, much like every innovator they now have a dilemma of how to stay in front while watching both Azure and GCP create more functional solutions for enterprise customers to build their business upon. As GCP continues to ramp the number of certified engineers and experts in core cloud-native solutions like Kubernetes, AWS has found it critical to shoring up partnerships to attempt to lock out the young Turk.<\/p>\n However, while enabling partners to develop and improve on your technology and bring its products in larger domain and ecosystem projects, it opens the door to being disintermediated. A case in point that AWS to rushing to address is AWS outposts. With the rise of hybrid Cloud and the extension of public Cloud, AWS is seeing customers retreat from its hyperscaler services to diversify and reduce costs. Integration firms are partnering with competing compute and data solutions to bring in stateless cloud solutions optimized for the customer domain, not the IT.<\/p>\n We see AWS as a very strong player when it comes to partnerships from a revenue perspective, but GCP is emerging when data is top of mind for enterprises. Partners are leveraging the AWS brand to boost revenues as the complexity of AWS is a challenge for even the most sophisticated organization. With the industry reaching this cloud-data pivot point, the door is wide open for these partners to increase their revenue streams by offering domain expertise, complex integration, and long-term support services. AWS\u2019s own industry solutions lack real drawing power without these partners. And some partners, like IBM, bring tools such as Red Hat Open Shift for AWS (ROSA)<\/a> that are sorely needed by customers to orchestrate hybrid and multi-cloud solutions.<\/p>\nHFS views Google Cloud Platform as a refreshing future for enterprises considering their cloud migration more strategically to address data in the domain context<\/span><\/h3>\n
The importance of data isn\u2019t new… it’s your business strategy more than ever<\/span><\/h3>\n
Five steps you must take to get the data you need into the cloud<\/span><\/h3>\n
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Being a leader in data is more than having lots of storage, compute, and add-on SKUs<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
Domain experience is key and AWS needs partners to deliver this \u2013 and they may be disintermediated as a result<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
Data holds the keys to cloud supremacy and AWS knows they are in for a real fight with Google<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n