Microsoft Azure Expansion Offers More Partner Opportunities

Written by Kelly Teal
May 26, 2020

A survey highlights where organizations need the channel’s help with hybrid and multicloud environments.

…. each cloud service provider’s particular strengths. All the while, they like that they can avoid vendor lock-in.

AWS Out in Front

Similar to another recent study, Denodo found that Amazon Web Services still leads its rivals, with Microsoft Azure in second place. About 90% of organizations relying on cloud choose the two providers, Denodo said. Even so, respondents also employ Google Cloud. Among the three, Denodo said analytics surfaced as the top use case across each one. Logical data warehousing came in second at 43%, and data science at 41%.

Denodo’s Ravi Shankar

Of further interest: More than three-quarters (78%) of respondents said they run some kind of workload in the cloud. Separate but related, use of container technologies increased by 50% year over year, which Denodo interprets as use for scalability and portability to the cloud. About four in five (80%) respondents lean on some type of container deployment. Docker stands out as the most popular (46%), followed by Kubernetes (40%).

Perhaps a prime opportunity for channel partners stemming from these outcomes lies in providing data virtualization platforms (keeping in mind, of course, that this is Denodo’s specialty).

“Hybrid cloud and multicloud architectures are becoming the basis of data management, but the challenge of integrating data in the cloud has almost doubled (43%),” said Ravi Shankar, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Denodo. “Today, users are looking to simplify cloud data integration in a hybrid/multicloud environment without having to depend on heavy-duty data migration or replication, which may be why almost 50% of respondents said they are considering data virtualization as a key part of their cloud integration and migration strategy.”