What's your type? HP's Cloud28+ dating agency for European cloud services

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1 What's your type? HP's Cloud28+ dating agency for European cloud services Analyst: William Fellows 10 Apr, 2015 Cloud28+ is a federation of European cloud service providers, resellers, ISVs, developers and government agencies designed to drive cloud adoption across Europe via an aggregated catalog of services matching workload requirements with cloud services. As it approaches its first birthday, its chief protagonist, HP, has provided a progress update on what is effectively a dating agency for cloud services in Europe. The 451 Take Cloud28+ is an instance of HP's Helion Network, and is the blueprint HP will use to roll out other regional deployments. Without question it is a Trojan horse for HP's Helion ambition. However, there are other things in play here. It is a genuine attempt to rally European providers and consumers to drive cloud adoption in Europe, create jobs, and boost Europe's economy. It meets (perhaps uniquely) the European Commission's goal for its research projects, which are funded by taxpayers, to be sustainable beyond the life of the project itself. Cloud28+ takes a number of EC projects as its inputs. What HP, Cloud28+ and other federations/marketplaces require is a way for customers to be able to compare services, confident in the knowledge that they are comparing oranges with oranges, and looking at similar functions and capabilities think about a barcode or Kitemark that could describe service capabilities or guarantee certain criteria are met. While some firms are already circling on this, the opportunity remains to drive some real leadership here. Copyright The 451 Group 1

2 Technology Cloud28+ is a one-stop shop for discovering, buying and using services. It isn't about generating or making money in and of itself it's more of a dating agency that has some 150 company/service profiles in it. There are 32 ISVs certified for Cloud28+ today, with a further 22 in process and 150 more in the funnel, with some 400 applications already available in the marketplace. HP foresees this rising to 10,000. It's understood that providers specify how data will be handled, and what the services are compliant with, although how this will happen has yet to be confirmed. Those already in Cloud28+ include Progress Software, Numergy, SAP, ANSYS, Schlumberger, Orion Health, Tikit and Bromcom Computers, among others. It's not only technology here Lequa Net is a Swedish company (Lequa for Legal Equality) and HP OEM in Cloud28+ whose Lequinox platform can be used for managing process integrity, identity and roles, traceability, archiving, and legal interoperability. It can be used in conjunction with HP's Operations Orchestrator (which is now integrated into cloud services automation). HP envisages that a first set of services will use HP Helion OpenStack to support KVM, VMware and more. A second set will offer bare-metal support for VMware, OpenStack and others. All the services will need to be Helion/OpenStack-compatible. From June, users will be able to search, find and request services. They will be able to search on service-provider profile (certifications, cloud capability, security, billing, support, etc.), IaaS, PaaS, BPaaS and SaaS, with network function virtualization and telecom network connection categories to follow. The draft taxonomy for IaaS and VM service-type input document is available now. A service-provider description document will be available in April with additional service-type input documents. A list of available services online with indirect fulfilment will be available in June. The 'dating agency' will be in production by year-end. A catalog and comparison engine is being developed to enable customers to find and compare, like someone might use TripAdvisor. The IP being developed around these search and rank (comparison) algorithms as part of the Cloud28+ network and 'dating agency' is being incorporated into CSA, Helion and the wider Helion Network. Currently, HP allows customers to reuse the same search again (the search parameters are filed for reuse). A future enhancement will be that users won't have to reconfigure services at vendor sites after finding them in the Cloud28+ catalog. There won't be direct fulfilment of services through Cloud28+ consumers and suppliers will negotiate directly nor a centralized billing system due to data privacy constraints. There will, however, be an HP-built marketplace within Cloud28+ that will enable partners to exchange/access Copyright The 451 Group 2

3 content, perhaps in a community model. There will need to be a small amount of money raised in order to cover the cost of maintaining it. This function will also find its way back into CSA/Helion. It's planning to support a range of certification types, although which ones and how this will be administered isn't clear yet. Further out, HP is also looking to use elements of the IEEE p2302 draft standard for Intercloud Interoperability and Federation, which defines an ontology (concepts and their relationships) rather than a taxonomy (types and their attributes). It's also looking at the ISO cloud computing SLA framework. The service offerings are not SLAs in their own right, but they define service characteristics. Sustainability The Cloud28+ initiative very specifically supports the aims and objectives of the EU's ICT research funding, with its emphasis on the creation of value and jobs based upon the success of cloud in Europe. One stated aim will be to provide European software developers an alternative to US-domiciled cloud resources. In particular, and perhaps uniquely, it helps meet the EC's requirement that the projects it funds be sustainable beyond the life of the funding cycle itself. By taking work in other projects as starting and compliance points, this should be seen as a not insignificant achievement. Cloud28+ takes as inputs the work done in other European Commission projects that HP has led, and which have already been discussed in previous reports. These include CoCo (Confidential and Compliant) Cloud, which will end in 2016; A4Cloud (Accountability for Cloud); and Contrail (covering cloud federation and interoperability) projects. The projects (other than Contrail, which was led by French research institute INRIA) have been led by HP and funded as part of the EC's European Cloud Computing Strategy under its Framework Programme 7 (FP7) round, with the aim of creating 2.5 million new jobs and boosting the GDP in Europe by 1% to 160bn ($196bn) by Competition The competition for Cloud28+ will be the US and 'rest of the world' providers, which are not part of this federation. Other major cloud 'federations' include Cisco's Intercloud and NTT/Dimension Data's OneCloud, while firms such as IBM, Verizon and CenturyLink have major ambitions as public/private cloud providers. In public cloud, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Rackspace continue to gain ground. SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 The European Commission observed that in 2014 just 20% of organizations used cloud services in the EU, which suggests there is a significant opportunity. Cloud28+ will enable HP to drive some leadership and bring new providers and customers to its Helion Network. Initially, Cloud28+ will have a limited appeal to buyers seeking the right cloud services and resources to meet their needs, since the vast majority are delivered by US-based firms. Opportunities Threats To attract suppliers and consumers to the new breed of cloud marketplaces, exchanges and brokers, the protagonists will need to take a very different approach than with previous iterations of the IT cycle. The opportunity is to create and operate new business models rather than technology creation per se. Getting the services into use will be key. It is not the aggregation, federation, integration or broker technologies that are key here, and these should not be foregrounded. To be seen as a destination for cloud services in Europe, it will need no small amount of marketing. The question is: Who puts up the capital risk for this? While a small amount of capital may be forthcoming, it realistically needs some slam-dunk money spent by the founders to make sure it works. Fees charged on content transactions made via the dating agency could be used, although they will only come once there is liquidity through the marketplace. Copyright The 451 Group 4

5 Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; This report was originally published within 451 Research's Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: Copyright The 451 Group 5