L5 systems

• Large organisations face increasing cost and difficulty maintaining their ever growing data centre estates. The pressure comes from internal applications that need continually more resources and the need to grow the business, improve efficiency and adopt new applications from outside to do this.

  L5 can advise you on looking at your business and deciding on a strategy and policy for the Cloud. The stregy will look internall at current applications and see to what extent they can be migrated in whole or in part to the Cloud.

  The corporate Policy will cover the IT requirements of a Cloud application and will act as a checklist on the adoption of new vendors and their applications. Specifically if they can meet these requirements e.g. operation in an Amazon EC3 environment.

  Let L5 assist you in this process in a vendor independent manner from initial evaluation, through to conclusions, recommendations and beyond.

• Cloud Strategy and Feasibility Report Preparation L5 will prepare and independent analysis of current products for suitability to porting to the Cloud. Vendors may have a product offering that requires installation on a customer site. L5 will assist in analyzing the product and seeing to what extent the solution would benefit from being Cloud based. It would also look at the related value equation from the vendor and customer viewpoint.
  
• Cloud Vendor Selection Report Preparation Once the basic analysis is completed, then L5 can assist with an intelligent choice of the correct Cloud environment for the product.  There are now a number of blue chip candidates from companies such as Sun, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and possibly IBM in the future. This also requires an analysis of current customers wishes and preferences in the area and what the expected customer profile will be. Again the value proposition for the customer is highlighted and a prime focus for recommendation.
  
• Planning and Implementation Study The next stage once a target Cloud platform is selected is porting the existing product to the new environment. This will involve not just engineering  the solution but also addressing the installed base and how this can be managed with existing customers. In many cases customers should be delighted that capacity can be freed up in their data centres and cost of ownership reduced as well as increated scalability, robustness and security that such a move to the Cloud will represent for them. At all stages L5 can advise and assist in this process.
  
• Maintaining the Solution Solutions require to be maintained efficiently and effectively from a central point. L5 can assist in helping design, adopt or implement web based software distibution architectures that ensure that a customer's investment in your product is properly managed. Of particular relevance here is L5 expertise with OSGi based software distribution platforms.
  

“Arthur Morrison of L5 provided a very useful, detailed, overview of the cloud and where it is heading. He also gave us an insightful analysis of how we might make use of the cloud, including the issues involved and the pros and cons of various approaches. Arthur is a font of wisdom about the cloud, has an open minded and practical approach, and was able to quickly zero in on the specific issues that we need to consider.”
-Rory Macneil CEO, Axiope