Structure News: It's a hybrid, hybrid, hybrid, hybrid world

Where Palo Alto Is Hoping For Cloudy Days November 6th, 2015 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about the popularity of hybrids, Microsoft's uneven week, and HP's big bet. STRUCTURE NEWS TWO CLOUD TRENDS THAT COULD KILL VENDOR LOCK-IN ONCE AND FOR ALL When meeting the new boss, it's very common to wonder whether or not he or she is the same as the old boss. Such is life for tech buyers that are dipping their toes into cloud computing services, intrigued by the cost savings and flexibility that cloud services can provide but wary of finding themselves locked into multiyear contracts and complicated schemes that essentially traps their business inside a new type of vendor. We still have a long ways to go before Amazon Web Services rules enterprise IT with an iron fist, for sure. But I explored the topic this week in looking at two trends we'll discuss at Structure 2015: containers and the hybrid cloud (more on that in a minute). Public cloud providers are selling themselves as the modern alterative to old vendor mentalities, but once they take over, will they be able to resist those impulses?     Remember, Structure 2015 takes place November 18th and 19th in San Francisco. Buy your tickets here.   Featured photo courtesy Flickr user Tristan Taussac INDUSTRY NEWS IS HYBRID CLOUD THE ONE TRUE CLOUD FOR BUSINESSES? As public cloud services became The IT Plan among growing Silicon Valley startups, there was a fair amount of scorn heaped on the "hybrid cloud," or a combination of public cloud and private datacenters advanced by legacy enterprise tech companies. But years later, now that cloud computing services are practically mainstream, Fortune takes a look at the state of the hybrid cloud and wonders if this is the more practical future. IBM PUMPS UP ITS HYBRID CLOUD MUSCLE WITH GRAVITANT BUY Speaking of hybrid clouds and legacy IT vendors, IBM continues to prop up its cloud strategy by purchasing startups left and right. The latest is Gravitant, which according to IDG News Service makes software that helps customers manage workloads spread across multiple clouds. TECTONIC, COREOS'S KUBERNETES-BASED CONTAINER PLATFORM, HITS GENERAL AVAILABILITY Just in time for Structure 2015, when CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi and Google's Kubernetes guru Eric Brewer will share the stage, CoreOS announced this week that Tectonic is out of beta. Tectonic is basically the CoreOS operating system plus Kubernetes in one distribution, and Techcrunch reports that CoreOS is seeing traction with banks and telecom companies. MICROSOFT AND RED HAT TEAM UP TO OFFER LINUX ON AZURE CLOUD Ten years ago this announcement would have blown people's minds, but in 2015, it's more like, what took you so long? Recode notes that Azure customers will be able to specify Red Hat instances on Azure and that the partnership will also help customers with the theme of this week's newsletter, hybrid cloud. MICROSOFT'S ONEDRIVE PRICE HIKE HAS WRECKED ITS CLOUD STRATEGY One step forward, one step back for Microsoft this week? That's what The Register thinks after Microsoft decided to decrease the amount of free storage it makes available on its OneDrive service and raise prices, in response to a small number of customers who were apparently abusing the old system. "Changing OneDrive limits may seem a small thing, but it is a risky move for a company that is addressing declining Windows sales by investing in cloud services," author Tim Anderson writes. DROPBOX TRIES TO BOOST ITS REP BY TAKING A SWIPE AT BOX It's been a rough year or so for Dropbox, which is facing lots of questions about its massive valuation amid greater concern about the so-called "unicorns." Wired attended an enterprise-oriented event put on by Dropbox this week, but the event only seemed to underscore that rival Box has more of a grip on enterprise customers, a potentially huge market compared to the consumer-oriented customer base of Dropbox.   BIG PICTURE The first week of the new era of Hewlett-Packard was fairly quiet, albeit accompanied by a publicity blitz and a perhaps ill-advised video shared to Facebook that, as is wont to happen on the internet, generated a lot of angry comments about days past. But the two new companies, which will awkwardly share a campus in Palo Alto for the time being, represent HP's last best chance to become a relevant force in both consumer and enterprise tech. I'm more interested in the future of HPE, for obvious reasons. While HP Inc. will likely putter on selling PCs and printers to a declining but still rather large market, HPE has a chance to reinvent itself for the modern era of enterprise computing by really pushing the hybrid cloud. Many people who follow this market figure that the HPs, Dell/EMCs, and Oracles of this present world are just the DECs and Data Generals of this decade, doomed to obscurity. But I'm not so sure: skeptical CIOs (there are many) wary of a full-on public cloud strategy advocated by AWS and Microsoft will look for alternatives, as we explored in our opening segment. Whoever positions themselves as the premier hybrid cloud vendor could stand to win a fair amount of business. If Meg Whitman thought California was a rebuilding project back in 2012, she's got a real challenge on her hands now. The contrast in turnaround strategies undertaken by old foes Dell and HP will be a fascinating business school case study one day.     DISCOVER MORE   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2015 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.