Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how one Australian IT integrator has escalated cloud development to provide new cloud services portfolio.

1. Thomas Duryea’s Journey to the Cloud: Part One
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how one Australian IT integrator has escalated cloud
development to provide new cloud services portfolio.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: VMware
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're
listening to BriefingsDirect.
Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on how leading Australian IT
services provider, Thomas Duryea Consulting, has made a successful journey to
cloud computing. We'll learn why a cloud-of-clouds approach is providing new
types of IT services to Thomas Duryea’s many Asia-Pacific region customers.
Our discussion here kicks off a three-part series on how Thomas Duryea, or TD, designed, built,
and commercialized a vast cloud infrastructure. The first part of our series addresses the rationale
and business opportunity for TD to create their cloud-services portfolio built on VMware.
[Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Stay with us now to learn more about implementing the best cloud technology to deliver and
commercialize an adaptive and reliable cloud services ecosystem. Here to share their story on
this journey, we're joined by Adam Beavis. He is General Manager of Cloud Services at Thomas
Duryea in Melbourne, Australia. Welcome Adam.
Adam Beavis: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
Gardner: Let’s start a little bit high up. Why cloud services for your consulting and business
customers now? Have they been asking for it? Has the market shifted in some way that led you
to begin this journey?
Beavis: Certainly, the customers are the big driver while we are moving into cloud services.
Being a traditional IT integrator, we've been very successful showing a lot of data-center
solutions to our customers, but more and more we're seeing customers finding it harder to get
CAPEX and new projects and they are really starting to look at the cloud alternative.
Gardner: Why then have you looked at moving towards cloud services as a commercial
offering, rather than going yourself to a public cloud and then availing yourself of their services?
Why build it yourself?
Beavis: We reviewed all the possibilities and looked at moving to some of the larger cloud
providers, but we've got a strong skill set, a strong heritage, and good relationships with our
customers, and they forced our hand in many ways to move down that path.
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2. They were concerned about telcos looking after some of their cloud services. They really wanted
to maintain the relationship that they had with us. So we reviewed it and understood that,
because of the skill sets we have and the experience in this area, it would work both
commercially and then relationship-wise. The best move for us was to leverage the existing
relationships we have with the vendors and build out our own cloud.
Gardner: So who are these eager customers? Could you describe them? Do they fall into a
particular category, like a small to medium-size business (SMB) type of clientele? Is it a vertical
industry? Where is the sweet spot in the market?
No sweet spot
Beavis: That’s probably the one thing that surprised me the most. As we've been
out talking to customers and selling the cloud, there really is no sweet spot.
Organizations that you talk to will be doing it for different reasons. Some of them
might be doing it for environmental insurance reasons, because having their data
center in their building is costing them money, and there are now viable
opportunity to move it out.
But if I were to identify one or two, the first one would be independent software vendors (ISVs).
Cloud solutions are bringing to ISVs something they've looked for for a long time, and that’s the
ability to run test and dev environments. Once they've done that, they can host their applications
out of a service provider and not have to worry about the underlying infrastructure, which is
something, as a application developer, they're not interested in.
So we're seeing them and we're working with quite a few. One, an Oracle partner, will actually
run their tests in their environments in a cloud, and then be able to deliver those services back to
some of their customers. In other cases they'll run up the development in their cloud and then
import that to an on-premise cloud afterwards.
The other area is with SMBs. We're certainly seeing them, for a financial reasons, want to shift to
cloud. It's the same old story of OPEX versus CAPEX, reduced budgets, and trying to do more
with less.
The cloud is now in a position where it can offer that to SMB customers. So we're seeing great
opportunities appear, where not only are we taking their infrastructure into the cloud, but also
adding on top of that managed-service capability, where we will be managing all the way up to
the application.
Gardner: Based on this mixture of different types of uses, it sounds that you're going to be able
to grow your offerings right along with what this market demands. Perhaps some of those ISVs
might be looking for a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) direction, others more of a managed
services, just for specific applications. Was that important for you to have that sort of Swiss
Army knife?
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3. Beavis: Exactly right, Dana. Each one is addressing a different pain point. For example, some of
them are coming to us for disaster recovery (DR) as a service, because the cost of renewing their
DR site or managing or putting that second site out is too expensive. Others, as you said, are just
looking for a platform to develop applications on. So the whole PaaS concept is something near
and dear to us on our roadmap.
Each one continues to evolve, and it's usually the customers that start to drive you as a cloud
provider to look at your own service catalog. That’s probably something that’s quite exciting --
how quickly you need to evolve as a service provider. Because it's still quite a new area for a lot
of people, and customers do ask for varying things that they expect the cloud to be or what a
cloud is. We're constantly evolving and looking at new offerings to add into our service catalog.
Gardner: In my introduction I mentioned a cloud of clouds ecosystem. Does that make sense? Is
that the sort of goal that you are ultimately going to reach with your journey?
Beavis: It definitely is. We see it being more than just one offering in our eyes. We see us being
able to provide it to anyone, from a small reseller to an ISV, someone who develops their own
applications. Or, it's someone who works specifically with applications and they're not just
interested anymore in running their own infrastructure on their site or caring for it. They just
want to provide that platform for their developers to be able to work hassle free.
Gardner: So this means that you've got to come up with an infrastructure that can support many
different type of uses, grow, scale, and increase adaptability to the market. What were some of
the requirements, when you started looking at the vendors that you were going to partner with to
create this cloud offering?
Understanding customers' needs
Beavis: The first thing that was important for us was, as you said,
understanding our customers’ needs initially and then matching that to
what they required. Once we had that, those words you mentioned, scale
and everything, had to come into play. Also the cost to build these things
certainly doesn’t come cheap. So we had to make sure we could use the existing resources we
had.
We really went in the end with the VMware product, because we have existing skill sets in that
area. We knew we would have a lot of support, with their being a T1 vendor and us being a T1
partner for them. We needed someone that could provide us with that support from both a
services perspective, sales, marketing, and really come on the journey with us to build that cloud.
And then obviously our other vendors underneath, like EMC, who are also incredibly supportive
of us, integrate very well with those products, and Cisco as well.
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4. It had to be something that we could rapidly build, I won't say out of the box, because it’s a lot
that goes around building a cloud, but something that we knew had a strong roadmap and was
familiar to all our customers as well.
The move to cloud is something that is new to them, it's stressful, and they're wondering how to
do it. In Australia, 99 percent of customers have some sort of VMware in their data center. To be
able to move to a platform that they were familiar with and had used in the past makes a big
difference, rather than saying, "You're moving to cloud, and here is a whole new platform,
interface, and something that you've never seen before."
The story of the hybrid cloud was something we sat down and saw had a lot of legs, the
opportunity for people to stick their toe in the water and get used to being in the cloud
environment. And VMware’s hybrid cloud model, connecting your on-premise into the public
cloud, was also a big win for us. That’s really a very strong go-to-market for us.
Gardner: As a systems integrator for some time, you're very familiar with the other
virtualization offerings in the market. Was there anything in particular that led you away from
them and more towards VMware?
Beavis: Not really. It was definitely a maturity thing. We remember when Paul Maritz got on
stage four years ago and defined the cloud operating system. The whole industry followed after
that. VMware led in this path. So being a market leader certainly helped.
Needless to say, we're very good partners with some of the other providers as well. We did
review them all, but it was a maturity thing and also a vision thing. The vision of a software-
defined datacenter really came into play as we were building Cloud 2.0 and that was a big winner
for us. That vision that they have now around that is certainly something that we believe in as
well.
Gardner: Of course, they've announced new and important additions to their vCloud Suite, and
a lot of that seems to focus on folks like yourself who need to create clouds as a business to be
able to measure, meter, build, manage access, privacy, and security issues. Was there anything
about the vCloud Suite that attracted you in terms of being able to run the cloud as a business
itself?
Product integration
Beavis: The fact it was packing stuff as a suite was a big one for us. The integration of the
products now is something that’s happening a lot more rapidly, and as a provider, that’s what we
like to see. The concept of needing different modules for billings, operations, even going back 12
months ago, made it quite difficult.
In the last 12 months with the Suite, it has come a long way. We've used the component around
Chargeback, vCenter Operations Management, and Capacity Management. The concept now of
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5. software-defined security, firewalls, and networking, has become very, very exciting for us, to be
able to all of a sudden manage that through a single console, rather than having many different
point solutions doing different things. As a service provider that’s committed to that VMware
product, we find it very, very important.
Gardner: Margins can be a little tricky with this business. As you say, you had a lot of
investment in this. How do you know when you are succeeding? Is there a benchmark that you
set for yourself that would say, "We know we're doing this well when "blank?" Or is this a bit
more of a crawl, walk, run approach to this overall cloud business?
Beavis: Obviously that comes with a lot of the backend work we're doing. We take a lot of time.
It’s probably the most important part. Before we even go and build the cloud, it’s getting all that
right. You know your direction. You know what your forecast needs to be. You know what
numbers you need to hit. We certainly have numbers and targets in mind.
That’s from a financial perspective, but also customers are coming into the cloud, because just
like physical to virtual, people will come, initially, just with small environment and then they'll
continue to grow.
If you provide good service within your cloud, and they see that risk reduced, cost reduced, and
it’s more comfortable, they will continue to move workloads into your cloud, which obviously
increases your bottom line.
Initially it’s not just, "Let’s go out and sell as much as we can to one or two customers, whatever
it might be." It’s really getting as many logos into the cloud as we can, and then really work on
those relationships, building up that trust, and then over time start to migrate more and more
workloads into the cloud.
Gardner: Adam, help us understand for those listening who might want to start exploring your
services, when do these become available? When are you announcing them, and is there any
roadmap that you might be able to tease us with a little bit about what might be coming in the
future?
Beavis: We've got Cloud 1.0 running at the moment, which is a cloud where we provide cloud
services to customers. We have the automation level that we are putting in Cloud 2.0. Our
backup services, where people no longer have to worry about tapes and things on site, backup as
a service where they can just point to our data center and backup files, is available now.
Also DR as a service is probably our biggest number one seller cloud service at the moment,
where people who don’t want to run those second sites, can just deploy or move those workloads
over into our data center, and we can manage their DR for them.
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6. New cloud suite
But there's a big one we're talking about. We're on stage at vForum next Wednesday, November
14, here in Australia, launching our new cloud suite built on VMware vCloud Director 5.1.
Then on the roadmap, the areas that are starting to pop up now are things like desktop as a
service. We're exploring quite heavily with big data on the table, business intelligence as a
service, and the ability for us to do something with all that data that we're collecting from our
customers. When we talk about IT as a service, that's lifting us up to that next level again.
As I said earlier, it's continuously changing and new ideas evolve, and that’s the great thing
working with an innovative company. There are always plenty of people around driving new
concepts and new ideas into the cloud business.
Gardner: It's very exciting and we look forward to learn more. We've been talking about how
leading Australian IT services provider, Thomas Duryea Consulting, has made a successful
journey to cloud computing.
Our discussion today kicks off a three-part series on how TD designed, built, and
commercialized an adaptive and reliable cloud services ecosystem. The next part of our series
will delve more deeply into the how and what, rather than focusing, as we did today, on more of
the business rationale for this cloud infrastructure journey.
With that, I'd like to thank our guest for being here on BriefingsDirect today, Adam Beavis,
General Manager of Cloud Services at Thomas Duryea Consulting in Melbourne, Australia.
Thanks so much, Adam.
Beavis: Thank you, Dana. Absolute pleasure.
Gardner: And I'd like to thank our audience for joining and listening and invite them to come
back next time.
This is Dana Gardner, your host and moderator, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks
so much again for joining. Bye for now.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: VMware
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how one Australian IT integrator has escalated cloud
development to provide new cloud services portfolio. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC,
2005-2012. All rights reserved.
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