TenFour s IT Infrastructure Utility is cloudifying the uncloudable

Transcription

1 REPORT REPRINT TenFour s IT Infrastructure Utility is cloudifying the uncloudable WILLIAM FELLOWS 5 SEP 2018 For what can t be taken to the cloud, TenFour brings cloud s consumption-based, service-driven, retail model discipline. The company believes the cloud consumption model will be widely used to procure IT infrastructure within five years. THIS REPORT, LICENSED TO TENFOUR, DEVELOPED AND AS PROVIDED BY 451 RESEARCH, LLC, WAS PUBLISHED AS PART OF OUR SYNDICATED MARKET INSIGHT SUBSCRIPTION SER- VICE. IT SHALL BE OWNED IN ITS ENTIRETY BY 451 RESEARCH, LLC. THIS REPORT IS SOLELY INTENDED FOR USE BY THE RECIPIENT AND MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED OR RE-POSTED, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, BY THE RECIPIENT WITHOUT EXPRESS PERMISSION FROM 451 RESEARCH Research, LLC

2 For what can t be taken to the cloud, TenFour brings cloud s consumption-based, service-driven, retail model discipline. TenFour believes as much as 40% of IT spending can t be put into the cloud whether it s cabling, antennas, routers, switches and wireless access points, IP phones and IoT devices and swathes of underlying datacenter and network infrastructure. TenFour takes this on and sells it back to customers as a service. The company owns the assets and assumes the risk and since 2010 has been turning the rest of its IT infrastructure into a consumption service, much the same way AWS does for compute, charging a monthly fee. THE 451 TAKE Cloud is profoundly reshaping the industry. Technology consumers expect to access, assemble and pay for digital services in a simple, seamless and automated manner without requiring any specific knowledge of the underlying physical infrastructure. What 451 Research s 4Sight considers invisible infrastructure is instantly available, operates and scales regardless of specific requirements, and is billed and metered in a manner the customer prescribes. It works just as one would expect of a utility, which is where TenFour s IT Infrastructure Utility is aimed. It is effectively cloudifying the uncloudable and believes the cloud consumption model will be widely used to procure IT infrastructure within five years. RISK The IT industry has placed all the risk technical, operational and financial on the enterprise. It doesn t matter if it is outsourced or leased, the managed services provider or VAR essentially takes no risk for the design, operations and end-of-life replacement. TenFour s IT Infrastructure Utility is designed to address three types of risk which IT leaders face financial, operational and technological. In the financial case, TenFour owns the assets so customers bear no risk for underused hardware waiting to be deployed. Just as a company doesn t own the power lines and transformers that deliver its electricity, it doesn t lease or own the IT infrastructure TenFour provides. Procurement and sourcing departments don t have to piece vendors together like Lego bricks. IT departments don t need to chase vendors to hold them accountable when something fails or has compartmentalized visibility and limited access to network performance. TenFour claims to lower operational risk with end-to-end accountability from design to refresh, a consolidated 24/7 USbased NOC offering real-time co-management and the flexibility to transform at a pace that matches the buyer s business goals and needs. The proactive technology refresh embedded in the service reduces technology debt and technological risk associated with defects from end-of-life equipment. STRATEGY The services approach TenFour takes is aggressive. It will assess, take over and replace underlying datacenter and network infrastructure without disturbing the overlying applications and business operations during the transition. It replaces customer s equipment with its own standardized commercial hardware and its own software management, combined with IT professional services. This, it claims, removes the burden of IT operations at the infrastructure layer. The net benefit is that the process ultimately delivers the kind of efficiency improvements that put the customer on the same terms as datacenter giants like AWS and Facebook, in terms of operational costs and return on investment.

3 FIGURE 1 TenFour s goal remains to reduce IT infrastructure operations to a utility model a philosophy very much in-line with the aforementioned datacenter giants. The process begins with engagement and assessment, using software to discover, map, and make visible and searchable every asset and network connection in a given organization (e.g., core devices, mobile endpoints, and legacy hardware and applications). FIGURE 2

4 After that, the planning and migration stage begins, starting with the easiest or most opportunistic items (e.g., hardware already due for a refresh or unreliable/problematic infrastructure). FIGURE 3 As the process continues, TenFour elevates management and monitoring into its own systems, which are administered by professional services staff, and the relationship eventually shifts from migration to a managed services role, along with the promised gains in agility and efficiency. FIGURE 4

5 TECHNOLOGY TenFour has reference architectures for each platform/device. It uses equipment from Cisco and others to build at least four business solutions for each and offers a total of 250 devices. In its view, there have been no major new infrastructure developments since 2001 (virtualization). It uses the construct of an ITU (IT unit) as the unit of measure for not only the asset itself, but the power, management, labor and everything associated with its lifecycle. It has boiled down the universe of routers, for example, into four design points which essentially cover anything a customer will want to do and builds networks with these. It purchases circuits from telcos and contracts those to customers. The ITU comprises a monthly charge that customers pay TenFour. Users are charged per ITU per month regardless of how many days in a month they use it. Customers can add or turn off ITUs dynamically but, crucially, TenFour assumes all the risk here there is no penalty or additional charge for taking advantage of this. TenFour s bet is that customers will be happy with the service they get and are more likely to add new ITUs than delete them. By removing multiple vendors, suppliers, operators and other contractors, TenFour believes it all but eliminates the risk of defects in its devices, plus it takes vendor management and RFPs off the table. If something does break, there are only four models it needs to repair. It claims to provide SLAs with a true time to remediate from root cause to resolution (and not a weak average SLAs). It must deliver a single point of accountability. When things break, it is TenFour s problem. An automatic refresh cycle means that nothing is more than five years old TenFour provides everything from Layer 4 (transport) down in the network model as well as network security. It has direct connections to all the cloud providers customers don t need to go over the public internet. BUSINESS MODEL Headquartered in New Jersey and founded in 1998, TenFour now has 150 employees and claims to be profitable on a stream of recurring revenue worth some $54m based upon the 80,000 ITUs it has in production at an average of $50 a month per ITU. In 2017, it took $18m private equity funding from NewSpring Capital to accelerate growth and development. It had previously taken $7m venture funding to develop its services. In 2012, TenFour (then Alliant Technologies) launched a service initiative called Continuous Infrastructure Service (CIS) to align with trends in the burgeoning cloud computing market. It spun off a software development company, Red Forge, in 2014, to act as an incubator for its services. It rebranded to TenFour in 2017 to reflect its commitment to being responsive to customer demand for simpler and more effective IT practices. TenFour has 30 paying customers its older managed services business is used to upsell new services. It says two customers asked it to deliver three platforms each, all at once. The others have picked a platform to try. The sweet spot is companies with more than five IT platforms (400 to 500 ITUs). Its largest has 1,000. In a large organization it estimates ITIL-trained full-time employees can support some 250 devices/instances it can already support 4,000 and is aiming for 5,250. There was some complex financial engineering with banks over liability and risk around the implications of failure and equipment being left on-premises. It couldn t have the liability of big companies on its balance sheet instead banks buy the risk from it. If customers turn off ITUs, the equipment would go back to TenFour; however, no customer has yet returned anything. COMPETITION Revenue realization and labor costs make it hard for big firms to repair and replace equipment and the reason they don t take on risk, even in supposed hardware as a service capacity models. TenFour says its automated commission structure, lower labor costs and economics make it feasible. Traditional carriers and MSPs, in addition to the large global systems integrators, are competitors to some degree, including Accenture, Capgemini, DXC Technology, IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NTT, Fujitsu and the Indian heritage companies.

6 SWOT ANALYSIS STRENGTHS TenFour helps avoid technology debt with its proactive refresh based on reference architectures, which is claimed to mean fewer defects and an improved security posture. It claims customers infrastructure costs dropped by a quarter and labor costs by significant amounts. WEAKNESSES Until now engineering-driven, TenFour now needs a go-to-market sales culture to grow awareness and sales. Process engineering its key challenge: how may touches are required and how much does each cost? OPPORTUNITIES If the consumption model takes hold when it comes to uncloudable assets, TenFour will be able to take a leadership position. THREATS TenFour is a small company with a differentiated if not unique approach in a market dominated by large competitors using mostly traditional methods aligned with incumbent corporate processes. It will also get significant pushback from IT departments not wanting to let go.