Almost 35 years ago, if you needed a computing device to run business applications you had only five choices if you were not a Fortune 100 company running an IBM Mainframe: DEC, HP, IBM, Prime and Wang VS.

A bit of history

Although the initially purchased server had violent competition amongst those five providers, the inevitable upgrades of memory and disk storage were unfortunately captive to each vendor. As a customer you were forced to pay markups of two to three times what you initially invested and you got laggard technology. Competition, the pillar of free enterprise, was eliminated and buyers lost leverage and were trapped. Customers always want choice and EMC was created to provide that revolution.  As Copernicus had shared centuries before that we had it wrong, the Sun didn’t revolve around the Earth, we revolved around the sun. From this new reality, enterprise storage became the new landscape.   

History repeating itself 

More than a decade later a similar phenomenon occurred like a pendulum returning that inertia. Organizations, especially smaller ones were miffed that they had to buy and provision a dedicated server for each and every application desired. Why did you have to put 30 pizza box- sized servers into a really hot rack in an AC chilled closet to run 30 applications at a school for example?  The flexibility of choice once again created the necessity of virtualization. VMware was born to solve the lack of customer leverage and it created the ability to use a cluster of a few bigger servers to run hundreds of applications. The proliferation was so pronounced that their go to market strategy was set up so that everyone could buy VMware from indirect sources, clearly VMware had learned their marketing from Intel Inside! 

Now in 2021, you cannot conduct a career search or go casually to LinkedIn without seeing hundreds of posts per hour looking for the scarcest resource ever, Tech Talent. Companies need skilled professionals to help bridge the journey to the cloud by project and initiative.  Moving mission-critical, money-making applications to the cloud with portability between AWS a market share leader, GCP, the hungriest, most affordable and fastest growing and Azure, the public cloud most focused on security is the killer app that helps companies coming out of COVID-19 gain a competitive edge, drive incremental revenues, become first movers and once again as history has shown us provide customer choice. to move amongst these three leading public cloud providers are driving these deployments!   

Based on these historic lessons, who wants to use only one cloud vendor who can lock you into a contract chocked full of surprising tier and cost overrun charges?  Who wants to be the Chief Data Officer who repeats the cautionary tales of the past?  Who wants to suffer being captive to their public cloud without the ability to migrate to other clouds, while receiving state of the art security and optimization?   

A partnership that provides choice 

Taos, an IBM Company is a consultant and managed services provider that has done this thousands of times, has been around since 1989, exists without limits and maximizes your leverage and choice. 

ESG Research shared 91% of all applications will eventually be hosted in the public cloud. But, over 82% of the corporate data actually resides still on premises in data centers. It’s the journey that matters most. Which partner will you invest in to make the migration and not just survive, but thrive in the new normal while focusing on being agnostic? 

• A major electronics company used Taos to remediate their security issues  
• A web conferencing company counted on Taos to improve their security as they help save academia during COVID-19 
• A networking, cloud and security company used Taos to save 38% of their cloud footprint and 19% better annual cloud costs while moving up a service level 

Given these choice-based cloud migration and optimization examples it appears history may have modernized toward an environment where customer choice in products and services will always drive innovation. 

Learn more