RapidScale’s President, Mark Szotkowski, kicked off March with the next episode in our webinar series about Infrastructure as a Service and CloudServer. If you missed it, don’t worry! You can catch up here with the recording or check out the written recap below.
In the last few years, the server virtualization market has grown to a tipping point. It has become the norm in the minds of IT decision makers, which means no more cloud skepticism and much less concern around security. If these buyers want to purchase physical servers, they now have to justify it to the C-suite over an IT consumption model. As with previous webinars, we have gone ahead and gathered some statistics that give a further lay of the land:
- In the third quarter of 2016, worldwide traditional server revenue declined 5.8% YoY, and shipments declined 2.6% from the third quarter of 2015.
- The down drift in server spending is due to the increasing ability of customers to leverage additional virtual machines on existing servers, without new hardware, to meet server application needs.
- IaaS remained the fastest-growing cloud segment throughout 2016.
- Quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues, which include public IaaS, public PaaS, and managed private cloud, reached well over $8 billion in quarterly revenues and will continue to grow 50% per year.
- IaaS revenue will grow more than 25% per year through 2019.
Why Virtualization?
Given these statistics, you have to label this move to the cloud as more than a trend, but why is the move taking place? What are the market driving forces behind this massive change? This is our take:
- When end-users reaches the buying portion of their refresh cycle and make a physical server purchase, it can take months to spin-up the new infrastructure. With a virtual server purchase, it can be operational in days depending on the need for testing.
- Given the length of time it takes to purchase and implement new physical servers, IT buyers have to take a leap of faith when it comes to forecasting their workload needs because making changes to this CapEx expenditure can be impossible. Therefore, businesses now prefer “As a Service” because this consumption model allows them to pay for what they need. Under this buying arrangement, these organizations can spin up new servers as they grow or wind down portions of their infrastructure if they need to. No more ineffective utilization or overbuying.
- The IaaS model also drastically improves Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery over physical servers. Public cloud data centers will typically have stringent security measures – RapidScale’s in particular with a Tier 3 classification, which significantly cuts down on the chances of downtime. In addition, these data centers will have multiple sources of power, generators in case of power grid failure, and failovers to other data centers in case of complete downtime.
- The Infrastructure as a Service consumption model is also far superior when it comes to virtual security. Businesses using this service are now enjoying better security software for their apps and data than they can attain in-house. RapidScale’s offerings go above and beyond for our customers by encrypting their data from end-to-end.
RapidScale’s IaaS Solution: CloudServer
RapidScale’s foray into the market, CloudServer, doesn’t just offer the same benefits to the end user as any other IaaS product. CloudServer eliminates the need to spend capital on upgrading physical hardware by moving the IT investment into an Operational Expenditure model with virtual, enterprise-level hosted servers. Also, with a fully managed RapidScale option, a customer never needs to worry about patches, updates, or troubleshooting.
RapidScale CloudServer Platform
As previously mentioned, our CloudServer product utilizes best-of-breed vendors and software. We have our vendors visualized below:
Technical Differentiators:
- Enterprise-grade security
- Stability, reliability, support
- Cisco routers and switches
- Cisco and Fortinet firewalls
- NetApp Storage, All SSD
- Etc.
Not only does RapidScale engineer a superior product offering, but we also provide our white-glove service that allows us to compete against any other vendor. We’ve highlighted some features of our intimate, managed service:
Who is the typical CloudServer buyer?
Although organizations of all types and sizes can take advantage of CloudServer, we have compiled characteristics of the ideal customer to keep an eye out for when selling:
Business Size:
50-2,000 users
Top Client Sectors:
- Manufacturing
- Healthcare
- Finance
- Hospitality
Key Characteristics:
- Time for a hardware refresh
- Running apps on any type of server
- Need flexibility in resources
- Are rapidly growing or scaling
- Want enterprise-level hardware/security
- Have limited capital
- Have compliance needs
- Have DR needs
What makes CloudServer better than the rest?
Again, here at RapidScale, we know that the overall offerings around CloudServer pass along superior benefits to our end users. As previously mentioned, CloudServer’s ease of implementation eliminates the lengthy buying and implementation cycle, it allows the C-suite to transfer a sizable portion of their IT CapEx to a profit-generating effort that is more central to their core business, and it also gives wins in general to the IT department and C-suite. In other words, RapidScale’s CloudServer makes IT’s job easier around maintenance and support while also giving the C-suite more “bang for their buck”, which includes less of a need for additional IT employees.
The Next Big Thing: Hyperconvergence
Over the last couple years, while the RapidScale team has been traveling across the country speaking to other industry professionals and customers, one topic has been a consistent point of conversation: Hyperconvergence.
TechTarget defines Hyperconvergence as, “A type of infrastructure system with a software-centric architecture that tightly integrates compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources and other technologies from scratch in a commodity hardware box supported by a single vendor.” This pre-integration then gets a cloud implementation running faster than a normal infrastructure purchase. This new technology is garnering a lot of attention and favor from the industry. In fact, the research firm IDC predicts this market could reach $6.4 billion by 2020.
RapidScale has taken notice of this new technology route and is evaluating when hyperconvergence may be right for our customer base – keep an eye out for it soon!
CloudServer vs. The Competition
In any given competition for a CloudServer sales close, RapidScale could be competing with vendors and service providers of all sizes. However, our true competition can be narrowed down to three companies: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace.
Each vendor has their own strengths, which include affordability and strong do-it-yourself environments, but here at RapidScale, we know our strengths can trump these. Our differentiators include a 100% uptime SLA, service management for any size business, and intimate guidance and support that clients won’t find elsewhere.
We hope you will reach out to learn more! And don’t forget – Sales Webinars, moderated by President Mark Szotkowski, are on the first Wednesday of every month at 9am PST, and our new Technical Webinars, moderated by SVP, Cloud Engineering, Duane Barnes, are on the third Wednesday of every month at 9am PST. Make sure you register here!
Happy Selling!
