Tag: Forrester Research

nScaled Partners With Arrow Electronics To Distribute Its Cloud Disaster Recovery As a Service Solution

Today, nScaled announced a partnership with Arrow Electronics Inc. (Arrow) whereby Arrow’s enterprise computing solutions division will market nScaled’s Disaster Recovery as a Service solution in collaboration with its channel partners. As a result of the partnership, Arrow Electronics will integrate nScaled into its ArrowSphere platform and subsequently allow its partner community to price and configure nScaled for commercial availability within their channel ecosystems. nScaled offers Arrow’s channel partners the opportunity to market a disaster recovery solution that provides organizations with a cloud-based, disaster recovery solution designed to enable recovery of data and applications within less than 15 minutes. Built upon an infrastructure composed of datacenters in London, England, Ashburn, VA and Dallas, TX, nScaled’s cloud platform is divided into eight regions that collectively have the ability to ensure system uptime in the event that one of the regions fails. Moreover, one of the company’s SLAs promises the capability to recover all of the customers within a specific region in the event that region fails.

Customers can interact with nScaled’s solution by means of a visually rich user interface that illustrates the relationship between on-premise infrastructure components and their corresponding backup location within nScaled’s cloud platform. Moreover, the nScaled dashboard enables users to tag infrastructure components in order to selectively recover and restore infrastructure components related to a specific vertical or topic such as “Accounting” or “Customer X”. Customers set the frequency by which backups are performed and can choose to recover specific versions of the backup based on a time and date stamp. Targeted toward SMBs, the platform delivers a fully managed disaster recovery solution that absolves users of the necessity of building an offsite colocation center with all of its attendant capital expenses and maintenance requirements. In an interview with Cloud Computing Today, nScaled VP of Sales, Mark Jameson noted that the market for cloud-based disaster recovery as a service platforms is still very much in its infancy, although the space has shown tremendous growth over the last three years. Today’s announcement of a partnership with Arrow Electronics goes a long way toward extending the reach of nScaled and positions it to build on its designation by Forrester Research as a leader in the disaster as a recovery service space.

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Forrester Research Claims Apple Will Influence Computing Equipment Market More Than IaaS

According to its Global Tech Outlook Market for 2012, Forrester Research predicts that Apple is poised to radically reconfigure the computing equipment market by serving as a disruptive force that outweighs the influence of other technology trends such as cloud computing, virtualization, mobility and Big Data.

Even though many analysts argue that Infrastructure as a Service cloud computing will reconfigure the computing equipment market, Forrester’s Global Tech Outlook Market for 2012 takes a contrary position by noting that IaaS currently enjoys limited adoption. Forrester Research understands Apple’s forthcoming disruptive influence on computer equipment as follows:

Analysts have been predicting that cloud computing — specifically, infrastructure-as a service (IaaS) — will reshape the server and storage market… Actual adoption of IaaS remains limited…The biggest disruptive force in the computer equipment market thus is not IaaS, but Apple. This is a surprise, because Apple has not and does not directly address the corporate market, while turning a wide variety of consumer technology markets upside-down. But its rapid growth in the corporate market has been the big surprise of 2011, and it will be even more of a factor in 2012.

On one hand, Apple’s influence is surprising given that its products are targeted at consumers as opposed to the enterprise. Moreover, its “rapid growth in the corporate market” marked the surprise story of 2011. Apple’s capacity to turn the “consumer technology markets upside-down” underlies its ability to tap into the corporate space from the bottom up by touching professionals that subsequently end up affecting corporate reimbursements and enterprise-wide decisions to purchase iPads for employees.

The report forecasts corporate sales for Macs and iPads as follows:

• $6 billion in Macs and $6 billion in iPads in 2011
• $9 billion in Macs and $10 billion in iPads in 2012
• $12 billion in Macs and $16 billion in iPads in 2012

According to Forrester, Apple’s ability to gain market share in the enterprise space hinges on three components:

• Corporations purchasing iPads for their employees
• Small business owners purchasing Macs and iPads and charging the purchase to corporate verticals as a business expense
• Professionals purchasing Macs and iPads and charging them to the company for which they work as a business expense

The report predicts that global market share of Wintel PCs and tablets will decline from 85% in 2011 to 70% in 2013 as follows:

• $71 billion out of a global market share of $84 billion in 2011 (85% Wintel PC and tablet market share)
• $69 billion out of a global market share of $88 billion in 2012 (78% Wintel PC and tablet market share)
• $68 billion out of a global market share of $96 billion in 2013
(70% Wintel PC and tablet market share)

Forrester’s analysis of Apple’s ascendant power in the enterprise space does well to quantify the consumerization of IT spearheaded by Apple over the last decade. Moreover, the analysis points attention to non-cloud drivers on computing equipment that have been underestimated by other IT research analyst firms in recent months. Apple’s ability to consolidate market share in the enterprise space constitutes one of the fundamental questions for contemporary technology analysts and commentators. The heart of the question about Apple’s effect on enterprise computing concerns the tension between the consumerization of IT versus price and developer-driven enterprise decisions to embrace cloud computing and big data technology.