Transcript of a discussion on how regional cloud services providers are assembling partner ecosystems to add more customization to cloud procurement.

1. TasmaNet Ups the Cloud Game to Deliver a Digital
Services Provider Solution-Level Ecosystem Model
Transcript of a discussion on how regional cloud services providers are assembling
partner ecosystems to add more customization to cloud procurement.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the
Voice of the Customer podcast series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal
Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this
ongoing discussion on digital business innovation and how it’s
making an impact on people’s lives.
Our next cloud-computing innovation and transformation discussion
explores how regional cloud services providers are assembling
partner ecosystems to add more customization to cloud procurement.
We'll learn how integrations of the latest cloud tools and methods help smooth out the
difficult task of creating and maintaining cloud-infrastructure services contracts. The
results are more flexible digital services that both save cloud consumers money and
provide the proper service levels and performance characteristics for each unique
enterprise.
Stay with us now as we hear from a Tasmanian digital
services provider, TasmaNet, about their solution-level
approach to cloud services attainment, especially from
mid-market enterprises. To share how proper cloud
procurement leads to new digital business innovations,
we're joined by Joel Harris, Managing Director of
TasmaNet in Hobart, Tasmania. Welcome, Joel.
Joel Harris: Good morning, Dana. I'm excited to be here.
Gardner: Let’s start at a high level, looking at the trends that are
driving how cloud services are affecting how procurement is going to be done in 2017.
What has changed, in your opinion, in how enterprises are reacting to and leveraging the
cloud services nowadays?
Harris: We're seeing a real shift in markets, particularly with the small- and medium-
sized businesses (SMBs) in their approach and adoption of cloud services. More and
Harris
Gardner

2. more, there is an acceptance that it's okay to buy products off the Internet. We see it
every day within personal cloud, iPhones, the Apple Store, and Google Play to buy
movies. So, there is now the idea in the workplace that it's acceptable to procure business
services online through cloud providers.
Because of the success of personal cloud with companies such as Apple, there's a carry-
over in that there is an assumed equivalent success in the commercial sense, and
unfortunately, that can cause some problems. What we're seeing is a willingness to start
procuring from public, and also some private cloud as well, which is really good. What
we're finding, though, is a lack of awareness about what it means for businesses to buy
from a cloud provider.
Gardner: What is it that the people might have wrong? What is it that they've not seen in
terms of where the real basis for value comes when you create a proper cloud
relationship?
Harris: Look at the way personal cloud is procured, a simple click, a simple install, and
you have the application. If you don’t like it, you can delete it.
When you come into a commercial environment, it’s not that simple, although there can a
perception that it is. When you're looking at your application, the glossy picture, it may
talk about functionality, business improvement, future savings, and things like that. But
when you come to the implementation of a cloud product or a cloud service into a
business, the business needs to make sure that it has met its service levels, from internal
business requirements or external business requirements, and from customers and
markets.
But you also need to make sure that it has also married up the skills of your workforce.
Cloud services are really just a tool for a business to achieve an outcome. So, you're
either arming someone in the workforce with the tool and skills to achieve an outcome or
you're going to use a service from a third-party to achieve an outcome.
Because we're still very early in the days of cloud being adopted by SMBs, the amount of
work being put into the marrying up of the capabilities of a product, or the imagined
capabilities of a product, for future benefits to internal business processes and systems is
Solutions for
Hybrid and Private Cloud
IT Infrastructure

3. clearly not as mature as we would like. Certainly, if you look into the marketplace, the
availability of partners and skills to help companies with this is also lacking at the
moment.
Cloud Costs
Then, comes the last part that we talked about, which is removing or changing the
application. At the moment, a lot of SMBs are still using traditional procurement. Maybe
they want a white car. Well, in cloud services there’s always the ability to change the
color, but it does come at a cost. There’s traditionally a variation fee or similar charge.
SMBs are getting themselves in a bit of trouble when they say they would like a white car
with four seats, and then, later on, find that they actually needed five seats and a utility.
How do they go about changing that?
The cost of change is something that sometimes gets forgotten in those scenarios. Our
experience over the last two years is companies overlooking the cost of change when
under a cloud-services contract.
Gardner: I've also heard you say, Joel, that cloud isn’t for everyone, what do you mean
by that? How would a company know whether cloud is the right fit for it or not?
Harris: Simply look for real, deep understanding of your business. Coming back to the
ability to link up service levels, it's the ability to have a clear view into the future of what
a company needs to achieve its outcomes. If you can’t answer those questions for your
customer, or the customer can’t answer the questions for you as a cloud provider, then I
would advise you to take a step back and really start a new process of understanding what
it is the customer wants out of the cloud product.
Change later on can cost, and small businesses don’t have an amount of money to go in
there and continue funding a third party to change the implementation of what, in most
cases, becomes a core piece of software in an organization.
Gardner: For the organizations that you work with that are exploring deeper
relationships to private cloud, do you find that they're thinking of the future direction as
well or thinking of the strategy that they’d like to go hybrid and ultimately perhaps more
public cloud? Is that the common view for those that are ready for cloud now?
Harris: In the enterprise, yes. We're definitely seeing a huge push by organizations that
understand the breakdown of applications between suitable for private cloud and suitable
for public cloud.

4. As you come down into the SMB market, that line blurs a little bit. We have some
companies that wish to put everything in the cloud because it’s easy and that’s the advice
they were given. Or, you have people who think they have everything in the cloud, but
it’s really a systems integrator that has now taken their servers, put them in a data center,
and is managing them as more of a hosted, managed solution.
Unfortunately, what we are seeing is that a lot of companies don’t know the difference
between moving into the cloud and having a systems integrator manage their hardware
for them in a data center where they don’t see it.
There's definitely a large appetite for moving to the as-a-service model in companies that
have a C-suite or some level of senior management with ownership of business process.
So, if there is a Chief Information Officer (CIO) or a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) or
some sort of very senior Information Technology (IT) person that has a business focus on
the use of technology, we're seeing a very strong review of what the company does and
why and how things should be moved to either hybrid or 100 percent in either direction.
Gardner: So, clearly the choices you make around cloud affect the choices you make as
a business; there really is a transformational aspect to this. Therefore, the contract, that
decision document of how you proceed with your cloud relationship, is not just an IT
document; it’s really a business document. Tell us why getting the contract right is so
important.
Harris: It’s very, very important to involve all the areas of a business when going into a
cloud services contract.
Ecosystems of Scale
Gardner: And it’s no longer really one relationship. That is to say that a contract isn’t
often just between one party and another. As we're finding out, this is an ecosystem, a
team sport, if you will. How does the contract incorporate the need for an ecosystem and
how does TasmaNet help solve that problem of relationship among multiple parties?
Harris: Traditionally, if we look at the procurement department of a company, the
procurement department would draft a tender, negotiate a contract between the supplier
and the company, and then services would begin to flow, or whatever product was
purchased would be delivered.
More and more, though, in the cloud services contract, the procurement department has
little knowledge of the value of the information or the transaction that’s happening
between the company and the supplier, and that can be quite dangerous. Even though
cloud can be seen as a commodity item, the value of the services that come over the top is

5. very much not a commodity item. It’s actually a high-value item that, in most cases, is
something relevant to keeping the company operating.
What we found at TasmaNet was that a lot of the companies moving to cloud don’t have
the tools to manage the contract. They're familiar with traditional procurement
arrangements, but in managing a services contract or a cloud services contract, if we want
to focus on what TasmaNet provides, you need to know a number of different aspects.
We created an ecosystem and we said that we were going to create this ecosystem with all
of the tools required for our customers. We put in a portal, so that the finance manager
can look at the financial performance of the services. Does it meet budget expectations, is
it behaving correctly, are we achieving the business outcomes for the dollars that we said
it was going to cost?
Then, on the other side, we have a different portal that’s more for the technology
administrator about ensuring that the system is performing within the service-level
agreements (SLAs) that have been documented either between the company and the
service provider or the IT department and the big internal business units.
It’s important to understand there are probably going to be multiple service levels here,
not only between the service provider and the customer, but also the customer and their
internal customers. So, it’s important to make sure that they're managed all the way
through.
We provide a platform so that people can monitor end to end from the customers using,
all the way through to the financial manager on the other side.
Gardner: We've seen the importance of the contract. We understand that this is a
complex transaction that can involve multiple players. But I think there is also another
shift when we move from a traditional IT environment to a cloud environment and then
ultimately to a hybrid cloud environment, and that’s around skills. What are you seeing
that might be some dissonance between what was the skill set before and what we can
expect the new skill set for cloud computing success to be?
Sea Change
Harris: We are seeing a huge change, and sometimes this change is very difficult for the
people involved. We see that with cloud services coming along, the nature of the tool is
changing. A lot of people traditionally have been trained in a single skill set, such as
storage or virtualization. Once you start to bring in cloud services, you're actually
bundling a bunch of individual tools and infrastructure together to become one, and all of
a sudden, that worker or that individual now has a tool that is made up of an ecosystem of

6. tools. Therefore, their understanding of those different tools and how they report on it and
the related elements change.
We see a change from people doing to controlling. We might see a lot of planning to try
to avoid events, rather than responding to them. It really does change the ecosystem in
your workforce, and it’s probably one of the biggest areas where we see risk arise when
people are moving to a cloud-services contract.
Gardner: Is there something also in the realm of digital services, rather than just
technology, that larger category of digital services, business-focused outcomes? Is that
another thing that we need to take into consideration as organizations are thinking about
the right way to transform to be of, for, and by the cloud?
Harris: It comes back to a business understanding.. It's being able to put a circle around
something that’s a process or something we could buy from someone else. We know how
important it is to the company, we know what it costs the company, and we know the
service levels needed around that particular function. Therefore, we can put it out to the
market to evaluate. Should we be looking to buy this as a digital service, should we be
looking to outsource the process, or should we be looking to have it internally on our own
infrastructure and continue running it?
Those questions and the fact-finding that goes into that at the moment is one of the most
important things I encourage a customer looking at cloud services to spend a lot of time
on. It’s actually one of the key reasons why we have such a strong partnership at Hewlett
Packard Enterprise (HPE). The hardware and infrastructure is so strong and good, the
skill set and the programs that we can access to work with our customers to pull out
information and put it up into things like enterprise nets to understand what the landscape
looks like in a customer is just as important as the infrastructure itself.
Gardner: So, the customer needs to know themselves and see how they fit into these
new patterns of business, but as you are a technologist, you also have to have a great deal
of visibility into what's going on within your systems, whether they're on your premises,
or within a public-private cloud continuum of some kind. Tell me about the TasmaNet
approach and how you're using HPE products and solutions to gain that visibility to know
yourself even as you are transforming.
Solutions for
Hybrid and Private Cloud
IT Infrastructure

7. Harris: Sure, so a couple of the functions that we use with HPE … They have a very
good [cloud workload suitability] capability set called HPE Aura with which they can sit
down with us and work through the total cost of ownership for an organization. That’s not
just at an IT level, but it's for almost anything, to look at the work with the accounting
team, to look at the total cost, from the electricity, through to dealing with resources, the
third party contractors in construction teams. That gives us a very good baseline and
understanding of how much it costs today, which is really important for people to
understand.
Then, we also have other capabilities. We work with HPE to model
data about the what-if. It's very important to have that capability when
working with a third-party on understanding whether or not you should
move to cloud.
Gardner: Your comments, Joel, bring me back to a better understanding of why a static
cloud services contract really might be a shackle on your ability to innovate. So how do
you recognize that you need to know what you don't know going into cloud, and
therefore put in place the ability to react in some sort of a short-term basis iterate, what
kind of contract allows for that dynamic ability to change? How do you begin to think
about a contract that is not static?
Harris: We don’t know the answer yet. We're doing a lot of work with our current
customers and with HPE to look at that. Some of the early options we are looking at is
that when we create a master services agreement with a company, even for something
that may be considered a commodity, we ensure that we put in a great plan around
innovation, risk management framework side, and continuous service improvement. Then
there's a conduit for information to flow between the two parties around business
information, which can then feed into the use of the services that we provided.
I think we still have a long way to go, because there's a certain maturity required. We're
essentially becoming a part of another company, and that’s difficult for people to
swallow, even though they accept using a cloud services contract. We're essentially
saying, "Can we have a key to your data center, or the physical front door of your office?"
If that’s disconcerting for someone, well, it should be equally disconcerting that they're
moving to cloud, because we need access to those physical environments, the people
face-to-face, the business plan, the innovation plan, and to how they manage risk in order
to ensure that there is a successful adoption of cloud not just today, but also going
forward.
Gardner: Clearly, the destiny of you and your clients is tied closely together. You need to
make them successful, they need to let you show them the tools and the new flexible
nature and you need to then rely on HPE to give you the means to create those

8. dashboards and have that visibility. It really is a different kind of relationship,
codependence, you might say.
Harris: The strength that TasmaNet will have going forward is the fact that we're
operating under a decentralized model. We work with HPE, so that we can have a
workforce on the ground closer to the customer. The model of having all of your cloud
services in one location, a thousand kilometers away from the customer, while technically
capable, we don’t believe is the right mix in client-supplier relationships. We need to
make sure that physically there are people on the ground to work hand-in-hand with the
business management and others to ensure that we have a successful outcome.
That’s one of the strong key parts to the relationship between HPE and TasmaNet.
TasmaNet is now a certified services provider with HPE, which lets us use their
workforce anywhere around Australia and work with companies that want to utilize
TasmaNet services.
Gardner: Help our readers and listeners understand that your regional reach is primarily
in Tasmania but you're also in Australia and you have some designs and plans for an even
larger expansion. Tell us about your roadmap?
No Net is an Island - Tasmania and Beyond
Harris: Over the last few years, we've really been spending time gathering information
from a couple of early contracts to understand the relationship between a cloud provider
and a customer. In the last six months, we put that into a product that we actually call
TasmaNet Core, which is our new system for delivering digital services.
During the next 18 months we are working with some large contracts that we have won
down here in Tasmania, having just signed one for the state government. We certainly
have a number of opportunities and pathways to start deploying services and working
with the state government on how cloud can deliver better business outcomes for them.
We need to make sure we really understand and document clearly how we achieve
success here in Tasmania.
Then, our plan is, as a company, to push this out to the national level. There are a lot of
regional places throughout Australia that require cloud services, and more and more
companies like TasmaNet will move into those regional areas. We think it’s important
that they aren’t forgotten and we also think that for any business that can be developed in
Tasmania and operate successfully, there is no reason why it can’t be replicated to
regional areas around Asia-Pacific as required.

9. Gardner: Joel, let’s step back a moment and look at how to show, rather than tell, what
we mean, in the new era of cloud, by a proper cloud adoption. Do you have any
examples, either named or generic, where we can look at how this unfolded and what the
business benefits have been when it’s done well?
Harris: One of our customers, about three years ago, moved into a cloud services
environment, which was very successful for the company. But what we found was that
some of the contracts with their software services, while they enabled them to move into
a cloud provider, added a level of complexity that make the platform very difficult to
manage ongoing.
Over a number of years, we worked with them to remove that key application from the
cloud environment. It’s really important that, as a cloud provider, we understand what’s
right for the customer. At the end of the day, if there's something that’s not working for
the customer, we must work with them to get results.
It worked out successfully. We have a very strong relationship with the company. There's
a local company down here called TT-Line, which operates some boat vessels for
shipping between Tasmania and Mainland Australia, and because of the platform, we had
to find the right mix. That’s really important and I know HPE uses it as a catch phrase.
This is a real-world example of where it’s important to find the right mix between putting
your workloads in the appropriate place. It has to work both ways. It’s easy to come in to
a cloud provider. We need to make sure it’s also easy to step back out as well, if it doesn’t
work.
Now, we're working with that company to deeply understand the rest of the business to
see what are the workloads that can come out of TasmaNet, and what are the workloads
that need to even move internally or actually move to an application-specific hosting
environment?
Gardner: Before we close out, Joel, I'd like to look a bit to the future. We spoke earlier
about how private cloud and adjusting your business appropriately to the hosting models
that we’ve described is a huge step, but of course, the continuum is beyond that. It goes to
hybrid. There are public cloud options, data placement, and privacy concerns that people
Solutions for
Hybrid and Private Cloud
IT Infrastructure

10. are adjusting to in terms of location of data, jurisdictions, and so forth. Tell me about
where you see it going and how an organization like yours adjusts to companies as they
start to further explore that hybrid-cloud continuum?
Hybrid Offspring
Harris: Going forward, the network will play probably one of the biggest roles in cloud
services in the coming 10 years. More and more, we're seeing software-defined network
suppliers come into the marketplace. In Australia, we have a large data center, NEXTDC,
which started up their own network to connect all of the data centers. We have Megaport,
which is 100 percent software-defined, where you can buy a capacity for up to one hour
or long term. As these types of networks become common, it enables more and more the
fluid movement of the services on top.
When we start to cross over two of the other really big things happening, which are the
Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G, you have, all of a sudden, this connectivity that means
data services can be delivered anywhere and that means cloud services can be delivered
anywhere.
More and more, you're going to see the collection of data lakes, the collection of
information even by small businesses that understand that they want to keep all the
information, and analyze it. As they go to cloud service providers, they will demand these
data services there, too, and the analysis capabilities will become very, very powerful.
In the short term, the network is going to be the key enabler for things such as IoT, which
will then flow on to support a distributed model for cloud providers in the next 10 years,
whereas traditionally we are seeing them centralized into key larger cities. That will
change over in the coming years, because there is just too much data to centralize as
people start gathering all of this information.
Gardner: Well, I look forward to circling back and talking with you, Joel, in a year or
two to see that how that decentralization concept works. I think that you are right -- it’s a
huge new departure and it can be extremely powerful.
I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been discussing how regional cloud services
providers are assembling partner ecosystems to add more customization to private cloud
procurement, and we've heard how ecosystem-level integrations of the latest cloud tools
and methods help smooth out the difficult task of creating and maintaining cloud
infracture services contracts.
So, please join me now in thanking our guest, Joel Harris, Managing Director of
TasmaNet in Hobart, Tasmania. Thank you, Joel.

11. Harris: Thank you very much, Dana.
Gardner: And I would like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this
BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital business innovation discussion.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for
this ongoing series of HPE-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and do
come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Transcript of a discussion on how regional cloud services providers are assembling
partner ecosystems to add more customization to cloud procurement. Copyright
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2017. All rights reserved.
You may also be interested in:
• Converged IoT systems: Bringing the data center to the edge of everything
• IDOL-powered appliance delivers better decisions via comprehensive business information
searches
• OCSL sets its sights on the Nirvana of hybrid IT—attaining the right mix of hybrid cloud for its
clients
• Fast acquisition of diverse unstructured data sources makes IDOL API tools a star at LogitBot
• How lastminute.com uses machine learning to improve travel bookings user experience
• Veikkaus digitally transforms as it emerges as new combined Finnish national gaming company
• HPE takes aim at customer needs for speed and agility in age of IoT, hybrid everything•
• WWT took an enterprise Tower of Babel and delivered comprehensive intelligent search
• Strategic view across more data delivers digital business boost for AmeriPride
• Swift and massive data classification advances score a win for better securing sensitive
information