The IaaS market may be thoroughly dominated by AWS, but it isn’t for want of competitors trying, and new ones keep coming in to give it a shot. Take TriCore Solutions, for instance. The application management concern this week took the wraps off TriCloud, an on-demand IaaS that can be managed by the customer or with TriCore acting as an MSP through the company’s Managed Application Services. As an existing application management player, TriCore already employs over 200 experts in various bits of software.
“TriCloud is based on HP's Converged Cloud, a hybrid delivery approach based on common architecture spanning traditional IT, private, managed and public clouds. TriCore is in a unique position to help enterprises because they are experts at application and infrastructure management. Together we help companies deliver secure application services and performance in line with business needs and policies,” said Mark Clayman, COO at TriCore.
The 14 year-old company, aimed at the enterprise, today has over 250 customers. TriCore already partnered with HP to build the new IaaS, and has software partnerships with Oracle, SAP and Microsoft and ties to hardware vendors EMC and IBM.
SharePoint Story
One application TriCore knows well is Microsoft SharePoint. SharePoint may be the richest collaboration tool out there feature-wise, but that is also the problem. It is no fun to set up or manage. IT has its hands full keeping tabs on all the on-premises SharePoint apps launched by this group or that, and it can be almost as tough in the cloud – unless that cloud is managed.
That is the thinking behind TriCore Solutions’ SharePoint Managed Application Services.
While many users adopt easy and free collaboration tools like DropBox and Google Apps, Microsoft shops are seeing a huge uptick in SharePoint. The fact that TriCore has two decades in the SharePoint market shows just how long the platform has been around. And when it first arrived, it was more of a document management system, and Microsoft was arguing that Exchange, with its public folders and discussion threads, was the main collaboration tool. Oh, and back then collaboration tools were called Groupware.
Later Microsoft bought Groove Networks, and there was more confusion about Microsoft’s collaboration strategy, but in more recent years the entire push has been behind SharePoint and now it has the market share as result.
Tough Mountain to Climb
For partners, ISVs and service providers, AWS is one hot market. In Gartner’s latest ‘Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service’, AWS far outstripped all its rivals. “AWS is the overwhelming market share leader, with more than five times the compute capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other fourteen providers in this Magic Quadrant. It is a thought leader; it is extraordinarily innovative, exceptionally agile and very responsive to the market. It has the richest IaaS product portfolio, and is constantly expanding its service offerings and reducing its prices. It has by far the largest pool of capacity, which makes its service one of the few suitable for batch computing, especially for workloads that require short-term provisioning of hundreds of servers at a time,” the research house said.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
