Cloud Expo Europe afterthoughts

Last week Andy Slater, Lead Consultant in our Cloud Infrastructure recruitment team, attended the world’s biggest cloud event. Here, he shares his insight from the award-winning Cloud Expo Europe event.

I spent an interesting and thought provoking day last Wednesday at Cloud Expo Europe in ExCeL, London. There were many established ideas and solutions put across in some of the presentations I saw, but a few things in particular caught my eye.

The growth of OpenStack

OpenStack looks to be establishing itself as a powerful management layer for Open Source cloud solutions. However, implementation is tough so a strong foundation of internal knowledge is critical if you want to avoid using a solution provider. Despite these challenges, once you successfully implement, the administration is agile, scalable and powerful. With its popularity set to grow, I expect to see a demand for specialist consultants and project engineers in this space.

Cloud in a box

Azure continues to claw back some of the market from AWS in the public cloud space and an interesting ‘Cloud in a box’ partnership with Dell looks set to continue that trend and certification is increasing in the Azure space.

Disruptive data from Google

Google is expected to become a huge disruption to the established market with some really glitzy marketing around data analytics (unsurprisingly) and once a few established case studies start to come through usage is likely to explode. I know consultants and architects are already starting to sharpen their skills in this area in anticipation of specialist roles becoming available.

Shift towards service standards

Managed Service agreements are in decline – at least in the same way as we used to know them. Shorter term, pay-as-you-go type contracts are starting to replace them with a number of big players (including NTT) presenting their new pricing models. Why? Companies are now seeking more flexible contracts with a greater focus on service standards rather than being locked in to agreements that are restrictive to change. I’m sure this will lead to a further broadening of skills within managed service support teams and a continuation in the recruitment of specialists with a broad skill set underpinning that.

I’m looking forward to Cloud & DevOps world in a few months’ time. If you are attending, please get in touch and let me know what topics you’re interested in hearing more about.