Today, almost everything is a service. The times of the transactional model are lagging behind and organizations are looking for solutions that allow them to scale when necessary, at any time. As-a-Service models allow just that. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, CGI, Claranet, Microsoft, Noesis, OVHcloud and Schneider Electric give their opinion on the state of as-a-Service in Portugal.
As-a-Service continues to grow. Last year, more than 80% of IT leaders were adopting as-a-Service models in their organizations, even though there were some technical and human resources challenges.
The cloud allows all these services to be adopted by companies. The possibility of climbing at any time is one of the benefits that organizations find, being no longer restricted to the equipment purchased and that are now part of the company's legacy.
Portuguese Market
The Portuguese market is still very populated by companies that sell in the most traditional transactional model. However, it is more and more those who add some type of service to the business and, little by little, gain recurring business.
Then, organizations themselves begin to bet more and more on the as-a-Service option. The various cloud service providers allow that, through a set of clicks, any organization can take advantage of a specific service that meets their needs.
(…) Valter Fernando, Infrastructure Solutions Senior Manager at Noesis, explains that “the market is evolving” and “all perspectives are valid”. In the case of Noesis, customers look for integrated solutions, where the solutions are delivered “as a complete service”.
The Infrastructure Solutions Senior Manager says that there has been “no preference for IaaS, SaaS or PaaS; it depends a lot on the needs that the customers have and the architectures that we have to design for each one of them ”. Currently, it is necessary to pay attention to the fact that “not all workloads can be transferred to the cloud”. (…)
COVID-19 effect
In early 2019 - or later in early 2020 - organizations made their business forecasts for this year. With the pandemic caused by the new Coronavirus, companies had to revise - for better or for worse - these predictions.
Valter Fernando says that “the impact of the pandemic was significant” and Noesis felt that impact “particularly on customers”. However, “the pandemic ended up giving another perspective that would help us to look at disaster recovery or business continuity in another way”.
Thus, "there was an adoption of these as-a-Service models and today the various organizations perceive the practical advantages that these models bring and how they can help in an adaptation that today has to be very fast", says Valter Fernando. On the other hand, many organizations “were unable to make this adaptation exactly because they did not implement these agility models”.
Today, organizations find themselves in this paradigm of needing to do so and adopting cloud and as-a-Service but end up restricting their investment due to the uncertainty that is currently experienced. (…)
IaaS
Although Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is part of the most well-known models, there are others that are not usual in companies' day-to-day activities, such as communications or networking as a service.
National solutions
If it is true that several international companies have started doing business in Portugal, it is equally true that national organizations can do the same.
Any company can sell anywhere. An organization that was previously restricted to the national territory can now sell its products in an as-a-service model to any customer in another country, however distant it may be.
Noesis Infrastructure Solutions Senior Manager states that “there is definitely a place for platforms and services that are developed in Portugal to be exported to the rest of the world”, not least because Portugal “is a reference in IT production and we have a great capacity for know- technical how ”.
Noesis does just that on a daily basis, exporting services and developing some software to the rest of the world, where these solutions are exported “almost on a daily basis”. It is also necessary to take into account that the national market does not have the capacity to absorb everything that is produced in the country, being necessary for many companies to export their products abroad.
*Complete article published in IT Insight.
