The IT roadmap throughout the digital transformation process is a journey, long and complex, and must not be underestimated. Like any other journey it starts with a first step which most organizations have identified as implementing an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) service model.
This is convenient both from a technical and cultural standpoints.
We are living in the era of “seamless user experience”, in other words, we have the ability to follow our customers through many different touchpoints both online and offline, recognizing and empowering them through many new services offered in the cloud.
Talking about consumer services, cloud computing is a buzzword shared between business and IT. We are at the verge of a big shift in IT driven by a simple but powerful assumption, we all are both consumers and employees. Indeed, employees and in particular knowledge workers, are looking for the same simplicity, responsiveness and convenience they find in their daily activities on their personal devices also in the consumption of business applications. Indeed new organizational models are emerging based on the collaborative editing of documents, contextual IM and presence and internal social networking.
From a business perspective the picture drawn represents a technological enabler underneath the collaborative economy, where “cloud native” start-ups, like Uber or AirBnB define new business models that struggle for a new generation of IT, simpler, quicker and elastic (please, have a look at the collaborative economy honeycomb to have a quick overview of how big this is going to be).
In this scenario, OpenStack is an open source project, collaborative by design, which is approaching the production stage in a growing number of enterprises [According to OpenStack, Ironic is already at production stage in some companies]. OpenStack is, as we said before, an IaaS engine sit on top of one or more hypervisors and able to manage and oversee the provisioning of compute, storage and networking resources through a web dashboard. OpenStack has more than 10k contributors from the community and nearly all the big vendors are investing on it. At least from a number perspective, OpenStack represents a convenient candidate for the first step previously described.
What we have drawn in this infographic is an overview of OpenStack adoption focused on the italian market. We submitted a survey to a group of companies from different industries, all participating to the Italian OpenStack User Group, to understand its real adoption and nature of its deployments.
Why Italy? First of all, because I am italian, so I took the advantage of home court. Then, I think Italy is an easy observable market, rich of medium sized, highly distributed businesses that are playing the digital transformation match to evolve at a fast pace and stay alive.
I have personally seen many ~150M$ companies being early adopters of DaaS or implementing cloud ready infrastructures. In specific industries, such as in Utilities, Banking or Telco, there is a strong push to drastically differentiate the businesses, launching ancillary services. (E.g. Eni announced in 2014 a car sharing project called EnJoy).
I have a mixed background that spaces from IT to business consulting and now more than ever, I’m observing this curious converging trend, between these two worlds and I have the privilege to find myself involved.
I am honoured to have the opportunity to be part of .info News team having access to such a broader audience. My goal is to bring value exploring key ICT concepts both from a business and IT perspectives.
Moreover, I am a fan of the “keep it simple” philosophy. I love working on new ways to convey data and ideas and I’ll drive this concept within virtualization.info and cloud computing.info. The first tool I chose is obviously infographics, I hope you will enjoy it. Once again, proud to be on board and feel free to get in touch with me for any inquiry.