AWS CEO Andy Jassy showed signs of frustration at his AWS re:Invent keynote address in December.
Customers weren’t moving to the cloud nearly fast enough for his taste, and he prodded them to move along. Some of their hesitation, as Jassy pointed out, was due to institutional inertia, but some of it also was due to a technology problem related to getting entrenched, on-prem workloads to the cloud.
When a challenge of this magnitude presents itself and you have the head of the world’s largest cloud infrastructure vendor imploring customers to move faster, you can be sure any number of players will start paying attention.
Sure enough, cloud infrastructure vendors (ISVs) have developed new migration solutions to help break that big data logjam. Large ISVs like Accenture and Deloitte are also happy to help your company deal with migration issues, but this opportunity also offers a big opening for startups aiming to solve the hard problems associated with moving certain workloads to the cloud.
Think about problems like getting data off of a mainframe and into the cloud or moving an on-prem data warehouse. We spoke to a number of experts to figure out where this migration market is going and if the future looks bright for cloud-migration startups.
Cloud-migration blues
It’s hard to nail down exactly the percentage of workloads that have been moved to the cloud at this point, but most experts agree there’s still a great deal of growth ahead. Some of the more optimistic projections have pegged it at around 20%, with the U.S. far ahead of the rest of the world.
David Linthicum, chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte, has been working with cloud technologies for nearly two decades, and says the 20% figure is probably a pretty good estimate for infrastructure. It could be double that, perhaps, if you include SaaS and infrastructure together, but he says it’s probably not that much.
Linthicum says that to this point, companies have mostly moved the easy stuff, but now comes the more challenging workloads. It won’t be that easy to move these, especially if you want to take advantage of the fact you’re in the cloud.
“You don’t want to take crappy systems from on-prem and move them to the cloud,” he says. “Rank-and-file IT folks moving to the cloud are trying to improve their systems as they relocate, taking advantage of the relocating.” That means if a startup can come up with a clever solution for moving deep-rooted on-prem data to the cloud, they could be setting themselves up for a big market for some time to come.
Getting a move-on
Joshua Burgin, director and tech advisor at Amazon, says before you start moving to the cloud, you need to figure out what you have, which can be challenging inside larger organizations: “What we found a lot, and this is where we’ve been investing significantly, is that a lot of people don’t even know what they’re running. So they have these collection facilities that might be just closets to professional data centers that they’ve built or co-location facilities.”
Simply getting an inventory of data and applications is a good first step, he advised. To help in this regard, the company made two key acquisitions last year when it nabbed CloudEndure and TSO Logic in quick succession. “In CloudEndure’s case, it actually simplifies migrating your applications, and TSO Logic helps give you recommendations to understand what applications you’re running,” he says.
“Then it helps you discover the [operating] environments and gives you the ability as part of the migration to right size and improve your costs as you do the migration.”
Debanjan Saha, vice president of data analytics at Google, says that beyond that, there is a complex series of steps involved in moving data from on-prem to the cloud.
“You are not only moving your data and your schema, which is essentially the data model, but you also need to move your application stack with that, which is, for example, ETL tools that you have built, ETL scripts that you have built, which is what feeds data into the data warehouse.” He says part of it is automated, but part of it requires partners like Accenture or WiPro to help. Smaller partners like startups can also help.
Making investments
Creighton Hicks, a partner at Dell Technologies Capital, agrees that moving those next workloads won’t be easy, and as an investor he sees an opportunity in that space. In fact, he has invested in Datometry, a company that is helping move Teradata data warehouses to the cloud along with the proprietary extensions and custom applications built on top of that data.
They achieve this through virtualization, allowing customers to move the legacy workloads much faster without having to rewrite these applications from scratch for the cloud, precisely the kind of difficult workload Linthicum alluded to.
“The question is, how do you move the workloads that are not moving quickly or at all. What’s keeping them on-prem? So that’s an area where the investment thesis definitely was in line with that with respect to Datometry,” he says.
Another example of venture investment in a cloud migration tool is Model9, an Israeli early-stage startup that recently got a $9 million Series A investment led by Intel Capital. The company helps move data between mainframes and the cloud, a difficult problem to solve. As CEO Gil Peleg told TechCrunch at the time of his funding:
Mainframe data is locked behind proprietary storage that is inaccessible to anything that’s happening in the evolving, fast-moving technology world in the cloud. And this is where we come in with patented technology that enables mainframes to read and write data directly to the cloud or any non-mainframe distributed storage system.
It’s also worth noting that Google Cloud acquired Cornerstone last month, another company that helps move legacy mainframe workloads to the cloud.
These are just some of the examples of the companies being created to solve the tough cloud migration problems that exist out there. One thing is clear — there is going to a big demand for these kinds of solutions as companies look to shift more of their workloads, especially the entrenched ones.
Companies that think creatively will be poised to capture this market in the coming years. It’s a huge opportunity. Just ask Andy Jassy.