Enterprises want to focus on business value, not IT infrastructure
Google is one of the largest server manufacturers in the world and among the four big players in the cloud-computing/datacenter space. In a recent presentation, Craig Box, global lead for Google Compute go-to-market, gave a glimpse of the tech powerhouse’s strategy in that competitive space.
Box was speaking at the Datacenter Dynamics Converged event held last week in London. Box said computational power is now a commodity, so how does a service provider stay competitive?
Looking back at enterprise IT, Box said the old approach was to build a wall around the network and only allow access from on-site terminals; all that changed with the adoption of dial-up and VPN access allowing access over the Internet. With always-on, mobile data hungry millennials, that model is changing again, Box said.
“Sixty-six percent of millennials expect to work flexible hours either in the home or in the office,” Box said. “We’re starting to deal with a very different set of people we have to support. We have to start thinking about how we provide power-efficient experiences to people, which is something we previously didn’t have to do.”
So given those conditions, what’s the goal of enterprise IT?
“What we really want to do is solve business problems … using IT. If you don’t solve these problems, your employees will get their credit cards out … and they will buy access to whatever service they think best solves the problem for them,” Box explained, adding that’s done by providing open source development platforms, and by taking compute power to the next level and providing white-glove service.
“Ultimately, all the programmers want to do is the development,” Box said. “Someone else can provide the piece in between that’ll let you scale. You don’t want to focus on infrastructure; you want to focus on business value.”
The Google exec also provided a rare glimpse into how the company provisions its data center servers, which comprise some 70 edge locations in 33 countries.
“We don’t talk about the details of what we build, where we put it … but one thing that I could find an actual quote … Google is probably one of the largest server manufacturers in the world. We don’t sell servers to anybody,” he said. “We’re not selling these servers; we’re building them to our specifications to run workloads at this kind of scale. It’s becoming a commodity market.”
In that commodity atmosphere, managed services differentiate a provider, Box said.
Cloud computing power is “becoming like electricity. There’s no point in just providing commodity compute when I can buy it from a different vendor.”
