IBM still the best cloud: Longhaus

IBM has again been named the top cloud performer in Longhaus' annual Australian cloud-provider report, which ranks providers of infrastructure as a service.

From a list of 175 providers that offer cloud services to Australian firms, 50 were qualified to be evaluated by Longhaus, and 45 were shortlisted using the answers to over 90 survey questions. Last year, 35 providers were shortlisted.

IBM is setting the pace, according to Longhaus. It has an "exemplar of a cloud-computing business for enterprise clients at a global level", not requiring minimum equipment and providing services out of six centres globally, including two in Australia.

Wipro, which Longhaus classed as an aggregation vendor — one that forged relationships with other vendors to offer their technology, including SAP, Amazon, BMC, Cisco and Oracle — came in at second place.

"Their problem is they market terribly," Longhaus research director Scott Stewart said.

Datacom came third, lauded for its efforts in the New Zealand government. It also won Longhaus' local performance award. Emantra, which Longhaus referred to as "Microsoft as a service", was slotted into fourth place, and Fujitsu took fifth place.

"[Fujitsu] have been tireless in improving their offering," Stewart said, although he added that there is more groundwork for it to do in integration.

Area 9, which runs its service out of a Tier 3 datacentre in the Northern Territory, was the winner of the rising star award.

Other vendors mentioned were HP, which Longhaus said had started slow, but has done a lot of work on high-level enterprise offerings; and Dimension Data, which Stewart praised for managing workloads, making them cloud ready and then transitioning them to the cloud. Amazon received a lower score because of its lack of geo-commitment; CSC was called out for its extreme commitment to Australia; OrionVM was named "potentially the fastest cloud in the market"; and OBT was praised for focusing on an exit strategy to the point of getting references from customers who had left its cloud and exited with their data.

Last year, IBM and Fujitsu were in first and second place, respectively, with Aussie providers Ultra Serve, Melbourne IT and Cloud Central rounding out the top five.

The field has improved immensely since then, according to Stewart, who said that the field was unimpressive last year.

"To me, it was a market that was racing to get something out there, and a lot of it was really bad," he said.

Last year, only 13 vendors exceeded Longhaus' 3.0 benchmark. This year, it was 57.

"Everyone has done dramatic improvements," he said. Cloud companies have moved from minimum commitments to no commitments, from strict contracts to flexible contracts and from pricing based on reservation to pricing based on consumption.

This means that even if a provider doesn't rank at the top, they are still very good, according to Stewart.

The conversation has moved from whether companies have a cloud product to how well they operate their cloud, he said.

However, there is still a lot of work to be done in the area, he said, and the cloud excitement bubble seems to have burst, with CIOs apparently having reduced enthusiasm.

The things that cloud products are still missing, and that companies really want, are cloud compliance with the provisions of the Australian Privacy Act; the reduction of service failures and outages, and compensation for when this occurs; performance metrics, so that they can see how well the service is operating, and not just whether it is up or down; and accreditation to industry standards.

In the last 12 months, 30 per cent of cloud-service providers have had an outage or service failure, he said. In addition, 24 per cent of providers have had a security breach in the past 12 months.

Unfortunately, according to Stewart, the view of many providers is that security comes out of the box from whatever provider they are using to enable their cloud. They are also relying on these vendors for the functionality, instead of spending on their own research and development.

According to Stewart, the security measures implemented also have a traditional focus on perimeter instead of on data-loss prevention, which is going to raise interesting legal issues down the track.

Providers have burned through their venture capital (VC) funding, and are now creating debt, Stewart said, which will lead to some of them becoming financially untenable, and even potentially shutting down.

Longhaus did not consider financials when completing its rankings, he said, which meant that companies had to do their own due diligence when making decisions on providers.

In future years, Longhaus might break up its analysis into separate types of cloud. Longhaus has changed its view about what cloud really is, Stewart said; cloud has permeated the enterprise, and even a service provided within an enterprise could be classified as being cloud if it's enabled by cloud technologies.

"It's not cloud or not cloud," he said.