A Cloudy Future for IT Procurement

The average modern business spends most of their IT budget on simply maintaining their network, leaving only a small amount available for upgrades and innovations. With the rate of advancements in technology, keeping up isn’t always easy. Many companies are turning to cloud computing for a cost-effective solution.

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Evolution of the Hybrid Cloud

Businesses use cloud services in many ways. Large enterprises may use private clouds to create a virtual environment for their digital operations. Smaller organizations and single departments often store files on public clouds for easy sharing and collaboration. Hybrid cloud services are a relatively new concept that combine the two.

Oracle’s latest strategy is one of the first to offer a hybrid cloud solution focused on hardware. “Our new infrastructure-as-a-service [IaaS] offering provides secure, virtualised, compute and storage services in the Oracle Cloud or — and this is very important — an identical infrastructure service installed in our customer’s datacentre as an Oracle-managed private cloud,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison.

HP Raises the Bar

The biggest downfall of Oracle’s latest cloud concept is that users still need to buy and keep up costly networking equipment to run the private cloud. HP offered similar CloudSystems a few years before Oracle released their option in September. In early December, HP announced a new program that allows businesses to enjoy the benefits of cloud economics within their private network.

Through the HP FlexNetwork Utility Advantage Program, communication service providers (CSPs) can offer businesses reliable network hardware solutions from HP on a pay-per-use basis. Companies have access to the hardware and software they need without wasting resources on maintenance or upgrades. “Our customers want to focus on running their business rather than operating networks for employee access to applications like voice and videoconferencing,” said Oliver Spring with CSP, Swisscom. “We can close the gap in our managed service offerings to deliver a networking infrastructure that allows our customers to move beyond operations to innovation.”

As more companies move away from capital investments in network equipment and software to subscription-based cloud options, the focus of IT procurement and budgeting are changing as well. Cloud solutions are cost-effective choices for businesses of all sizes, especially when hardware investments are no longer a concern.

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