Gartner Analyst Talks Cloud Enablement, Optimization, Skills for Partners

Research firm Gartner Inc. forecasts worldwide public cloud revenue will reach $263.4 billion this year alone. This points to cloud as the new normal for enterprise IT; therefore, channel partners of all stripes who want to make the most of this technology must ensure they are ready to do the heavy lifting on behalf of their clients.

Of particular interest is Gartner’s assertion that, through 2024, two-thirds of organizations will opt for multicloud strategies that reduce vendor dependency. This calls for partners to familiarize themselves with more than one provider so they know whose capabilities best fit the enterprise.

But that’s just one area where the cloud-centric channel will need to become more informed. Gartner, in its recent Predicts 2020 report, revealed additional trends that will transform organizations’ cloud adoption in 2020, including:

• Cost optimization. Through 2024, nearly all legacy applications migrated to public cloud IaaS will require optimization to become more cost-effective.
• Delayed migrations. Through 2022, insufficient cloud IaaS skills will delay half of enterprise IT organizations’ migration to the cloud by two years or more.

Gartner’s Gregor Petri

The cloud trends and challenges Gartner analysts see correlate with what astute channel partners encounter every day. Gregor Petri, vice president and analyst at Gartner, and a lead author of Predicts 2020, discusses those issues in this edited, in-depth Q&A, which includes Channel Futures’ follow-up takeaways for readers. While Petri does not work with the channel directly, his insight into the cloud issues enterprises face give managed service providers, VARs, agents, ISVs, and others a roadmap for better serving their clients.

Learn more about what Gartner uncovered in the Predicts 2020 report and what those discoveries mean for partners focused on the cloud.

CF: This recommendation – “Start thinking of cloud computing as an enabler for your digital business initiatives rather than as a data center replacement” — is really interesting. How would you suggest channel partners (MSPs, VARs, system integrators, etc.) approach this recommendation with their enterprise customers in mind and, importantly, why?

GP: A common mistake enterprises make when embarking on cloud adoption is to try and follow the fastest path, by simply lifting and shifting their existing applications from the in-house data center to cloud infrastructure, often inclusive of their traditional middleware and tooling. After this, they typically discover this has not automatically made their applications more flexible, cheaper, faster, scalable or reliable. In fact, many companies tell us they are surprised the cost went up instead of down. Using a car analogy, they basically went from using an owned – maybe slightly older and a bit dinky – car to moving around in taxis all day, every day, but without having changed the way they use transportation to get around. Think of ordering a taxi and leaving it in your driveway every night – as you likely did with your own car – but now with a meter running.

But even more severe, the business users of the organization may not even notice the company invested significant time and effort in moving to the cloud, because the way their applications behave stayed largely the same. To get the benefits of the cloud – such as elasticity, scalability, paying only for …