Claranet has offered managed application hosting for many years, but when you look out into the hosting market I am constantly surprised by other hosting companies running for the hills at the very thought of taking over the control and ownership of a customer’s live environment, and offering an SLA based on anything above the OS.

Why are most hosting companies scared of taking control above the OS?

It’s clearly no mean feat, you simply can’t take over a customer’s application and not expect issues. You have to learn how the customers application works, the issues it faces, and devise a contingency plan just in case something goes wrong. Organisations need to invest in processes such as ITIL which is a best practice framework for the provision of quality IT services, build the processes and documentation, and ensure they have sufficient qualified engineers to be able to support an application and all the infrastructure around it 24/7/365.

Why should developers care about managed application hosting?

It’s simple, the developer’s core focus is usually based around delivering great code. However, we typically find that they somehow manage to also get burdened with having to run the hosting environment as a side-line. This generally happens because they possess the technical ability and understand their app, but running infrastructure is not what they have studied for years and trained for, and when problems happen this diverts their attention from core business projects.

By letting Claranet manage the application, developers can concentrate on spending more time delivering code, meeting deadlines, and adding more value to the strategic projects their organisation demands.

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Whether you label it cloud, or managed, or hosted, or as-a-service, or something else – its lexicon is growing with its ubiquity – it is clear that more businesses in the mid-market are beginning to take advantage of the many benefits ‘it’ entails.

According to findings from the 2013 Claranet Research Programme 73 per cent of businesses were using some form of cloud service compared with 62 per cent the year before.

The benefits from utilising cloud – scalability, resiliency, efficiency and sustainability – are beginning to outweigh the concerns businesses previously had in terms of adoption.

Particularly for SMBs where the IT function of organisations is often not that developed, the pressure to succeed with less internal resource is more pronounced. Therefore the need to outsource day-to-day responsibility, while retaining executive control, is a particularly attractive option, as it allows stretched IT teams to concentrate on making a noticeable difference on a more strategic level.

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I am an Infrastructure-as-a -Service (IaaS) evangelist and having had the pleasure to work with Virtual Data Centre (VDC) during my time at Claranet, I can comprehensively say it is the future of hosting.

I often work with customers to build an ROI model, taking into account all the business benefits gained and all the costs saved.

Often they still turn to me and say:

‘For the same internal resource considered over a 3 year contract your VDC comes out twice as expensive as my on premise servers. I am not convinced all the other benefits are worth that much’

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With hosted email steadily becoming the defacto way in which email is delivered to organisations, the market has become saturated with varying providers that offer sliding scales of technology, service and pricing.

Traditionally the hosted email market was the preserve of service providers who partnered with vendors to deliver their service. Increasingly, the growth in the market has seen vendors choose to enter the market directly. The likes of Google, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and VMware all have direct market offerings.

Such strong vendor presence means that it has become a buyer’s market. Google and Microsoft are increasingly turning what was a cold war into a hot war competing aggressively for small and enterprise business. This has also meant that the traditional service provider market is trying to adapt its commercial model to ensure they are competitive with the market’s big beasts.

However, there are number of things that mean that vendors don’t necessarily understand the requirements of the mass of businesses that sit in-between the very small and the very large. Put simply the mid-market is poorly served by vendors. Their inability to focus on migration and service means mid-market customers are left to figure out how they can shoehorn this vendor platform into their business.

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“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” Laozi, 600 BC.

IT is not core business for many companies operating in the UK mid-market, yet IT is instrumental to their success in a highly competitive market place. Very often IT teams are under resourced and under invested.

As a board becomes more aware of the benefits of IT, their demands and expectations can lead to knee-jerk reactions and unreal expectations. It quickly becomes clear that a transformation programme is required to bring IT to be an enabler for growth, delivering improved efficiency, access to new markets and employee flexibility – the list is endless and still growing. But the IT team is already over stretched and locked in a daily battle just to ‘keep the lights on.’ Sometimes it is easy to lay the blame at the door of the IT department. Whilst the perception that IT is not delivering may be unfair, it is likely a reality.

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I heard a statistic from a leading vendor last week that said 80% of all unified communications projects fail. As someone who tries to help organisations truly embrace the transformational opportunity that exists with UC I was shocked by this statistic.

The biggest problem I see for those 80% of UC projects is that it is seen as a technology initiative. It isn’t. Technology is of course key, but a successful unified communications project must consider so much more than infrastructure, servers and software.

To ensure your project is truly transformational you must look outside the technology and at how this project will and should affect people, process and communication. I believe many projects fail before they start, but asking some very basic questions can avert this:

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A sorry state of affairs

Number porting may not be the most exciting subject in world but it is clearly important to many businesses, and as a blog topic it is sexier than a piece about the intricacies of rating call usage. Let’s face it, the current state of affairs is a mess. Back in 1996 when the industry (and I mainly mean BT) was told that number portability was to be a right for all customers the UK telecoms industry blazed a trail. It took almost a decade for most of our EU neighbors to catch up. However, since these halcyon days a climate of inefficiency and disappointment has prevailed.

The average time to port in the UK takes 2 days, but what that figure doesn’t take into account is the arduous processes put in place by the major telcos. The process from beginning to end can and does take weeks. Conversely, the average time to port in the USA, Canada, Israel and Australia is under 3 hours. We are most definitely getting something wrong as an industry.

Number portability was put in place to provide choice to both businesses and consumers, allowing them to take advantage of new market entrants and technologies in an exciting deregulated world. Instead it has become a minefield of processes, industry acronyms and (in my own personal opinion) stalling tactics from major telcos often to prevent churn.

My personal plea to OFCOM is this: make change happen and keep in mind the business consumers who are the lifeblood of our industry.

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Since 2008 industry experts have been predicting an explosion in desktop virtualisation. To cater for this predicted demand many companies built platforms.

The reality is that the numbers predicted by Gartner – 40% of all corporate desktops virtualised by 2013 – have failed to materialise. Hosted Desktop has not become ubiquitous. But there are thousands of companies using and enjoying the benefits of Hosted Desktop services, who would never go back to the traditional model. There is an ever growing market for these services and while industry predictions were over optimistic, in both scale and time frame, the reality is people are moving to the Hosted Desktop model.

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The advent of high speed broadband services has always been a hot topic amongst our partners, customers and the media at large. ADSL Max and ADSL2+ are great technologies which BT has rolled out to most of the UK. But, having recently moved to a fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) connection myself, it dawned on me that some of the features it offers are a real game changer for organisations wanting to enable or further improve connectivity to remote home office users. Interestingly this has nothing to do with the part of the service everyone seems so focused on: the download speed.

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The mid-market is a great opportunity for any new technology and no doubt we have all seen the J curves for future uptake of cloud services, just as we saw them for mobile, VOIP, smart phones etc.

The bottom end of the market has engaged – with little choice – based on low cost or free offerings; while enterprise organisations can pay for whatever fits a business case and can show an ROI within 36 months.

In contrast, the mid-market is notoriously resistant to change or spending money unless there is a problem to solve or a very quick ROI – usually in a period less than 12 months.

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