(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The final presentation Tuesday morning at Hosting & Cloud Transformation Summit was delivered by Brian Burba, vice president of business development at CA, who said he was excited to be presenting because we are at what he considers a very exciting time for IT.
It’s kind of chaotic right now, he says. Everybody is getting into everybody else’s business. But out of this turbulence, CA believes, will come a huge opportunities for service providers, and for businesses like CA.
What is happening in enterprises, he says, is that the traditional means of delivering business services is breaking down, and they’re looking at new IT solutions. But while their IT demands are growing quickly, their IT budget and resources are staying the same. The growing gap between those needs and resources is what will drive the opportunity, he says.
Among service providers, he says, some of the most important offerings these days are services higher up the stack like collaboration tools and “enterprise applications.”
Burba showed a few slides illustrating analyst predictions that more specialised services and SaaS applications are the high growth areas for hosting providers in the next few years.
He says he thinks there’s a new market emerging that sits on top of the virtualization and infrastructure that he calls an “assembly space.” He thinks this space will make a big difference in how service providers assemble and deliver services. There is a market there, he says, for products that run and orchestrate services.
It is maybe not altogether surprising that he thinks the AppLogic product that CA acquired last year from 3Tera is an interesting and potentially very significant tool in that space.
Using models of services makes it possible to assemble images of complete services quickly and easily. He says you can do a lot of things with AppLogic you couldn’t do otherwise.
By automating and virtualizing that assembly space, he says, you can streamline time to market by simplifying the process of composing a service, and aggregating services from outside suppliers. You can optimize for cost by using commodity hardware and deploying services from templates. And you can reach more markets by offering more varied and unique packages of assembled services.
He finished with a video clip of Layered Tech CEO Jack Finlayson talking about how his company uses the AppLogic tool to provide customers with flexible access to infrastructure, adding that CA has picked up a really interesting piece of cloud computing technology with that acquisition.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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