Blurred lines, as consumer tech swallows delivery of BIG IT

Nice devices, now speak 'enterprise' to me

Amazon offers choice

Amazon’s assault on the enterprise market has resulted in a tiered structure to AWS support. With all offering an unlimited number of support cases with pay-by-the-month pricing and no long-term contracts, Amazon hopes it will give enterprises some level of choice over the sort of help they can expect to receive.

AWS Basic Support offered to all AWS customers for no extra charge includes access a Resource Center, Service Health Dashboard, Product FAQs, Discussion Forums, and Support for Health Checks.

In addition, Enterprise or Business level services include customer support via phone, chat email and screen share, including help to configure third-party software and architecture guidance.

While all customers get access to a technical account manager, an Enterprise level package promises a 15-minute response time (one hour for business level), business review and customer built reports.

AWS charges $49 per month for the Developer-level tier. But the Enterprise level support will cost a minimum of $15,000 — or a percentage monthly AWS usage ranging from 10 per cent for the first $150,000 to three per cent of monthly AWS usage over $1m.

Even factoring in discounts as usage grows, an enterprise customer with a monthly usage of $1.2m will fork out a monthly support cost of $70,500.

Meanwhile, all customers have access to AWS Trusted Advisor, an automated tool that inspects the AWS environment and identifies opportunities to save money, improve system performance and reliability, or help close security gaps.

For enterprise IT users who are more used to dealing with the Microsoft’s and Oracle’s of this world, Results' Langley says the change in dynamic is a non-issue: “The consumer tech companies have already built huge enterprise businesses and are geared up for this – AWS is a $5bn business already and used by companies as large as Pinterest, Netflix and htc.”

JAMF Software is an Apple specialist helping commercial and public sector organisations manage their Apple devices. The company is also an enterprise AWS customer. “When we first started on the AWS platform [in 2002] it was very similar to the consumer proposition and the support channel was either non-existent or unknown,” said CTO Jason Wudi.

The shift towards community-based support and the prevalence of support information available in a self-service format is one thing. But while AWS has certainly changed the model it hasn’t cracked the enterprise engagement model entirely yet. “Enterprises still want suppliers that speak enterprise language – that includes multi-year terms, upfront payment and indemnification. There’s still work to do,” Fellows warned.

Wudi agrees that the speed of development of today’s technology platforms means support structures needed to step up a notch. He’s not kidding. Last year AWS issued 516 feature releases.

“Enterprises are used to visibility into what’s going to happen down the road," said Wudi. "An IT department want to have an annual budget or a plan for IT services and standards. And you can’t do that it you don’t know about something until three months before it’s launched.”

Nonetheless, for traditional suppliers playing catch up with consumer invaders to the enterprise market, the lessons are clear, Langley says. “They have recognised that they don’t have the expertise in user experience and mobile apps that are now a must-have for all enterprise IT solutions. They’ve responded by trying to bring those skills in-house through acquisitions and partnerships.”

In addition to IBM’s deal with Apple, she cites SAP’s acquisition of travel and expense management software company Concur last year for $8bn. “Concur had created user-friendly apps for business travellers to use on any mobile device and its expertise in creating user experiences that mimic those that customers have from their personal smartphones apps was a big driver behind that deal.”

There is certainly some evidence of a change of approach among more traditional IT suppliers, no doubt prompted by the entrance of IT providers more versed in a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) dialogue.

“Microsoft for example is going about a re-invention and is recognising that the world has changed, but it’s uncomfortable with going the full distance,” Fletcher said.

Increasingly, the firms with a consumer pedigree are becoming mainstays of corporate IT.

Their presence is helping drive a trend toward consumption based, service driven and monthly billed tech. What they lack, though, is the support pedigree owned by the Microsofts, SAPs and Oracles. This trio, meanwhile, are changing they way they deliver IT in response to the Apples, Amazons and Googles.

It’s just a matter of how far both sides meet in the middle and, then, where customers chose to place their money. ®