Who will claim the throne of the Supercloud? And how long will the tech winter last?
Supercloud was coined to be a one ‘solution’ to rule them all or in technical terms, the answer for all the complexity by having a central monitoring, provisioning and control console to abstract the complex layers of IT systems from edge, co-location, datacentres to public clouds.
The whole idea is to have a single tool to manage legacy and new platforms that have been around for decades, as well as those that have emerged in the last decade.
Cloud has dominated the conversation for quite a while with many organisations already adopting cloud with Amazon Web Services. As the conversation grew around the cloud, many found themselves onboard to not one but a few clouds, hence the name multi-cloud.
Reasons range from mergers and acquisitions which require a consolidation of the sprawling IT estates; and shadow IT where silo IT systems emerge.
On-premise IT infrastructure vendors such as Dell and HPE have maintained the lion share of the computing workload market at about 70% despite the onslaught from cloud vendors.
The race to defend the on-premise market share came along when Amazon launched Outposts in Year 2018, an answer to the slowing growth of public cloud adoption by providing a solution for clients looking to localize data for security and achieve lower latency on-premise.
Some of the interesting observations include a possible consolidation of peripheral infrastructure software solutions. Alliances and adoption strategies will form to provide scale and ease of management.
For example, a supercloud provider may select certain backup and recovery solution providers, or certain AI/ML tools as the main offerings in their centralised management console ecosystem.
In a recent conversation with headhunters who sought answers from large institutions, the recent tech sector layoffs will continue for at least another six months.
My guess is the massive displacement of tech professionals from Internet companies will begin to move to Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), as the attractiveness shifts to Smart Digital for companies in traditional industry verticals where transformation is needed to incorporate technology into effective business and operational use cases.
Many of these companies depend on system integrators, MSPs and CSPs to solve their challenges without the need to deal with a lack of new technology skillsets in their organisations.
This is an interesting transition period for everyone in the tech sector including me as companies grapple with the realisation that the cloud conversation is way broader than originally thought of with the fact that bulk of the world’s computing workload remains firmly on-premise.
Having said that, the future is anybody’s guess but we can try to be intelligent about it.
I am Mar Vin Foo 🌿🪟.
Thank you for reading ahead of times.