Cloud Managed services question: How do Deloitte, Hitachi or the several other public cloud infrastructure & managed services companies distinguish themselves from managed service offerings by CSPs such as AWS Managed services?
They look very similar in their offerings, so what are the differentiators or value add for both AWS or Deloitte? Thank you!
CTOs in non tech companies should not be spending their budget keeping the lights on. This is exactly why you need a good MSP.
I’ve been in high growth ecomm companies where the IT spend is more than the marketing spend for this very reason. Big bloated internal IT teams.
Those CTOs did not last very long.
Deloitte does not have their own cloud / data centers. They’re providing cloud managed services on any hyperscaler. They’re basically abstracting the complexity of managing the workloads and infrastructure all the way through the application layer.
You answered your own question.
Which company in their right mind would commit to only using one cloud and why? It makes no sense.
That would be like a logistics company deciding to forever only buy one brand of truck. Why would they do that?
I finished a project for a very large financial institution last year. They claim, in every published document that they are an AWS shop. They are moving large parts of their on-prem footprint to AWS in an effort to completely exit their datacenters by 2023.
Well, guess what. They have a huge footprint on Azure and are actually moving all their Widows servers to Azure. Then of course messaging, AD, and so much more too.
Oh wait, there are a few apps (I mean like a couple of hundred) that are best fit to move to GCP. So, they are doing that too.
Oh wait, some apps are replaced by SaaS.
But if you talk to their execs and read their website... "we are an AWS shop"
ok sure
everyone is multi-cloud and always will be
With Active Directory, Office 365, Teams, and several other critical services, Azure will always be a part of any large company. It can't be avoided and there is no reason to try to avoid it.
People say all kinds of things based on their feelings and marketing. But everyone will be multi-cloud.
Would you hire Microsoft to build out your AWS infra? Would you hire AWS to build out your Azure infra? No
Cross industry expertise and experience is why we get hired. If I was a client, I literally would want someone that has built multi-cloud to be the top architect and engineer leading the team. He can have specialists on his team if they want.
AWS is huge and will maybe always be king in size and total features. But as cloud tech has matured, there is no reason to focus on only one. They play well together perfectly fine.
Following.
I would assume that AWS and Azure prefer to partner with Deloitte, hitachi as their implementation partners - or are they starting to build their own professional services organization?
AWS has had a proserv team for a while and they are offering managed services. They don't have the deep industry experience as their implementation partners but sure will over time.
We’ve actually partnered with the cloud providers, taking MSP work from them (more like a referral, I didn’t mean “take” in a negative perspective) when they didn’t feel like they had the expertise in the product(s) being migrated and maintained. It’s a logical business model: they may be the cloud SMEs, but they don’t always have the past performance or quals on the app or industry side. It’s also happened when scale (from a practitioner perspective), or lack thereof, was not attractive to them.
AWS does not have the past performance or quals at this point in time and so need partners. Wonder if that changes over time.
I see that their managed services model almost as competing with their "partners"
we haven't seen Azure push any managed services on us but rather suggest partners in their ecosystem. same with AWS but we use them less.
This conversation has to be had in the context of the workload being migrated and managed. Not all workloads are the same - migrating and managing a SAP HANA system is very different than doing the same for a web application. It requires specialized skills that the hyperscaler may never want to hire and retain.
Following from a ServiceNow standpoint -
Why are people constantly going to HI and needing SN professional services so often? Very rarely in my implementations are we needing to utilize HI for anything outside of the self-service capabilities.
I’ve actually worked multiple ProServe engagements with AWS. AWS doesn’t really want to run a consulting business, but so many customers need help, it doesn’t make sense not to. Most of the time these engagements will need more bodies than AWS can offer, so they’ll subcontract out to partners.
On the managed services offerings, it’s an OpEx play -> business pays for “cloud”, at some negotiated rate, and now they don’t need to have a cloud operations team, cloud architecture team, cloud engineering or any other services - they can lift/shift their DC somewhere else and sell the facility. Or, if there’s a modernization component, they look to the MSP to say “this is what a cloud app looks like”, and any software teams just package up their jars or node bundles in the specified way.
If you walk into the cloud to do this yourself, you’ll spend a lot of money just staffing the cloud team, before you even “save money” or “innovate” by moving to cloud, so if you’re a cheap CTO in a non-tech company, the MSP offering is tempting on paper.
From what I’ve seen, most orgs that go MSP churn for the length of their agreement, then once the CTO is ousted, they quit and build a cloud team properly.
I think the differentiator is in the perceived work in configuration and execution. You’ll likely have to staff your AWS-managed experience more heavily, as they’re not first and foremost a professional services group. With the Deloitte service offerings, you’re able to staff fewer people internally - maybe somebody in a leadership position - but otherwise you let Deloitte do all the sausage-making. Deloitte is likely using AWS in the background, so Amazon is happy either way. Really the managed offerings come down to staffing. Not having to hire any FTEs for your cloud department could be seen as a win if your primary business doesn’t feel techy. The AWS offerings will still likely require bodies, which is how the cost equations even out.