© 2013 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Overview

The market for cloud computing continues to heat up, with more vendors—both net-new and long-established—looking to take advantage of the opportunity and an increasing number of public and private sector organizations leveraging these services. Indeed, more than half of the respondents in ESG’s recently published 2013 IT Spending Intentions Survey report that they are already leveraging cloud computing to some degree already (see Figure 1). Additionally, a previously conducted study revealed that half of current cloud computing users expect that more than 20% of their annual expenditures for IT infrastructure hardware and associated management software will have shifted to these services within three years.1 It seems that IT organizations have reached the tipping point with cloud computing, which means they need to find efficient and effective ways to leverage cloud computing resources.

Figure 1. Usage Trends for Public Cloud Computing Services

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2013.

Along comes Gravitant, a relatively new entrant to the enterprise-grade cloud space that makes private and public cloud resources easy to source, consume, and govern. Gravitant’s cloudMatrix platform uniquely applies a supply chain management (SCM) process to IT to optimize and manage the consumption of virtualized infrastructure and private, public, and hybrid clouds. In this way, Gravitant can reduce an organization’s spending while improving the agility of IT resource delivery. CloudMatrix works with on-premises infrastructures, making private cloud resources easy to consume

1 Source: ESG Research Report, 2012 Public Cloud Computing Trends, March 2012.

We currently use a cloud computing service(s), 57%

We have plans for or interest in cloud

computing services, 31%

We have no plans for or interest in cloud computing services,

10%

Don’t know, 2%

What are your organziation's plans for public cloud computing services? (Percent of respondents, N=540)

Cloud Services Brief

Supply Cloud Management (SCM)

Date: February 2013 Author: Wayne Pauley, Senior Analyst

Abstract: Choosing the right service providers, managing resources with one governance model, and right-sourcing workloads based on cost, SLA, and trust can be a daunting prospect. Some call this private cloud, others refer to it as public cloud, and still others as hybrid cloud. A better moniker might be enterprise cloud. Enterprise clouds are more attainable with solutions like Gravitant’s cloudMatrix.

Cloud Services Brief: Supply Cloud Management (SCM) 2

© 2013 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

and monetize as well as making it simple to choose which private, public, or hybrid cloud resources are best suited for particular enterprise workload needs and business objectives. Gravitant’s services assess the current environment; analyze the public/private cost and performance models; propose where to right-source specific workloads and re-provision them; and implement a common governance and management methodology. The cloudMatrix service is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-delivered and non-disruptive in its implementation.

Key elements of the Gravitant solution include:

SaaS-based ITaaS as a subscription. Upgrading a virtualized data center to cloud and ITaaS requires complex and expensive software elements for automation, orchestration, and service management. Gravitant allows the IT shop to utilize these software components via a Software-as-Service subscription model. This eases capital costs and removes maintenance obligations as well.

Shift from IT’s traditional allocation model to a demand model. IT budgeting is often based on a strict annual planning process, locking in fixed resources for the budget year. This doesn’t allow IT to be responsive to on-demand requests or seasonal expansions without being burdened with resources that are idle when they aren’t needed. Gravitant allows a company to elastically expand into public cloud providers such as Terremark, Savvis, and Amazon Web Services as needed. This reduces the need for underutilized capital resources while making the business far more agile.

Supply chain methodology applied to IT process management. During the 80s and 90s, manufacturing processes were transformed by SCM, yet IT still often uses a one-off project-based approach to managing infrastructure resources. Gravitant takes the best of SCM methodology to automatically and intelligently employ cost controls and right-sourcing workloads based on governance policies driven by SLAs and resource availability.

Near real-time multi-provider provisioning and management. Let’s face it, in the new world of cloud computing, IT is facing stiff competition. In order for IT to compete as well as mitigate the risks of shadow IT, the organization has to transform itself into a service provider as well as a broker for external cloud services. Gravitant’s cloudMatrix allows both to occur by providing near real-time multi-provider provisioning and management.

More about the Gravitant Supply Chain Methodology:

1. Gravitant’s cloudMatrix first discovers assets and resources such as VMware infrastructure, HyperV, or public cloud

resources running on AWS.

2. Once the current resources are discovered, Gravitant’s integrated service catalogs are used to evaluate resource

cost models against the internal and external sourcing options. Gravitant provides a collaborative solution design

capability so that the solution architecture can be optimized for various private (e.g., openstack or VMware) and

public clouds (e.g., Amazon, Savvis, Terremark, Rackspace, and others).

3. Since cost may not be the primary driver, SLAs and resource availability are also taken into consideration.

4. The next step is for the Gravitant system to provision and deploy the workloads on the appropriate resources that

are located on-premises or on a public provider. Since the system also has a predictive engine, the workloads and

SLA compliance are constantly monitored. If workloads need to be shifted, the system alerts the IT procurement

manager and cloud administrators so the right decision can be made to support the business appropriately.

5. The last element of the Gravitant cloudMatrix system is the embedded governance policy engine that assures

pricing compliance, appropriate administrative controls, and consumption thresholds, etc. Gravitant’s governance

engine provides a current “Bill of IT” to the CIO and CFO so there is no guessing about IT costs.

Cloud Services Brief: Supply Cloud Management (SCM) 3

© 2013 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Figure 2. Gravitant CloudMatrix Process

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2013.

Analysis

The Gravitant product CloudMatrix should be seriously considered by companies already down the path of implementing some cloud services or contemplating it. Cloud computing holds a tremendous amount of promise for IT and ESG research shows just how significant the shift is. There are a number of challenges such as choosing the right provider(s), assuring that security requirements and SLAs are enterprise grade, and employing IT’s governance standards across clouds. Putting the company’s systems and more importantly its data at risk by extending the exposure to go beyond the firewall has been discussed as a serious concern since the advent of cloud. The risks have included the potential for breaches at cloud providers, the reduced lack of control and visibility, as well as the risks of outages that can occur. Gravitant implemented a large-scale system for one of the largest states in the country that started out as a failed implementation of a large services firm. Gravitant’s solution was able to allow the state to realize reduction of infrastructure costs of 30%-40% as well as reduce provisioning time from more than a week to almost real-time.

The Bigger Truth

ESG is not suggesting that Gravitant’s cloudMatrix is the only option out there for managing cloud resources and it is a relatively new entrant to the market (though cloudMatrix has been deployed in production environments at a number of enterprise customers since 2011). ESG is suggesting that Gravitant has developed a unique approach that allows the enterprise to quickly transform itself to ITaaS by leveraging the strengths of SCM and it is a provider in a position to help your company manage the transformation successfully. For many years, IT organizations have taken a project-by-project approach to new technologies. By applying methodologies that are proven such as SCM, IT can become organizationally more efficient, which is going to be important when the data center becomes the data-center-without-walls. Cloud computing allows a company to place workloads at the right place at the right time and price. But only if there are systems in place to manage the elastic nature of today’s workloads and deal with the demand of the lines of business for IT to be more responsive. The old 80/20 rule of IT budget dollars going to maintenance/new projects is no longer acceptable and if IT doesn’t learn how to step up, then the business will continue to go around IT.

1. Discover and Assess

2. Analyze Cost Models

3. Analyze Sourcing Models 4. Provision and

Deploy

5. Govern, Evolve, and Scale

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