Battle in the Cloud
Marten Mickos of Eucalyptus Systems, Chris Barbin of Appirio, Peter Coffee of Salesforce.com and Kamesh Pemmaraju of Sand Hill Group take a stand on what's important in the evolution of the cloud computing market.
By M.R. Rangaswami, Sand Hill Group
Apr. 28, 2010
Is a private cloud really a cloud? Do virtualization and SaaS software "count" as cloud initiatives? Is cloud computing the end of IT?
The cloud computing marketplace is expanding rapidly with customers adopting a variety of technologies, models and strategies to drive business value in their companies. Our "Leaders in the Cloud" study found that the multitude of approaches to cloud success has not only led to a debate over solutions but also to controversy over terminologies.
In this article, Sand Hill Group Cloud Research Director Kamesh Pemmaraju, Appirio CEO Chris Barbin, Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos, and salesforce.com Director of Platform Research Peter Coffee present their perspectives on what "counts" in the rapidly emerging "Battle of the Cloud."
Private Clouds Makes Business Sense
- Kamesh Pemmaraju, Cloud Research Director, Sand Hill Group
Most people believe the promise of cloud computing is to be able to leverage the expertise of a vendor who is delivering computing power at such a high volume that the per-unit cost of management and maintenance goes down. But building private clouds means the internal staff has to learn and run all technologies associated with the cloud.
When you have to pay for all those capital, maintenance, and labor costs, do private clouds really make economic sense? Is there a certain volume at which a private cloud becomes the right decision?
The answer for many companies is "Yes."
Corporate data centers are not going away. Cloud computing is not the end of IT. The idea that someday we're going to throw a switch and move everything out to an external cloud is neither a practical nor a realistic scenario - It just isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future.
Enterprises have billions of dollars invested in IT infrastructure. It will take several years to fully amortize and depreciate those assets. Cloud computing is simply one new part of the overall technology strategy - just one new tool in the CIO's toolbox. With external clouds, enterprises want to avoid lock-in and deploy their applications and data to one or more clouds - including internal or private clouds - that meet their needs in terms of security, scalability, compliance, cost, performance and latency.
Furthermore, these enterprises are not ready to migrate their most sensitive and business-critical assets to an external cloud under third-party management, particularly if their infrastructure, services, and data are shared with other customers. The lack of control over mission-critical assets and concerns about security and privacy are driving many enterprises to build their own private clouds.
Not surprisingly, our "Leaders in the Cloud" research study uncovered compelling evidence that the major adoption and growth in the cloud space will take place in private and hybrid clouds over the next three years.
In a typical large enterprise today, one finds a heterogeneous mix of platforms, including mainframes, databases, applications and services. Thousands of applications - at least 20-30 percent of which are mission-critical - still run on old-world hardware that is tightly coupled to other applications and infrastructure. Therefore, not all applications will be able to move to the cloud. Enterprise customers will pick and choose applications and their IaaS, PaaS and SaaS (*aaS) vendors based on their internal business needs and technical and architectural constraints thus creating a diverse and heterogeneous cloud environment.
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The cloud computing marketplace is expanding rapidly with customers adopting a variety of technologies, models and strategies to drive business value in their companies. Our "Leaders in the Cloud" study found that the multitude of approaches to cloud success has not only led to a debate over solutions but also to controversy over terminologies.
In this article, Sand Hill Group Cloud Research Director Kamesh Pemmaraju, Appirio CEO Chris Barbin, Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos, and salesforce.com Director of Platform Research Peter Coffee present their perspectives on what "counts" in the rapidly emerging "Battle of the Cloud."
Private Clouds Makes Business Sense- Kamesh Pemmaraju, Cloud Research Director, Sand Hill Group
Most people believe the promise of cloud computing is to be able to leverage the expertise of a vendor who is delivering computing power at such a high volume that the per-unit cost of management and maintenance goes down. But building private clouds means the internal staff has to learn and run all technologies associated with the cloud.
When you have to pay for all those capital, maintenance, and labor costs, do private clouds really make economic sense? Is there a certain volume at which a private cloud becomes the right decision?
The answer for many companies is "Yes."
Corporate data centers are not going away. Cloud computing is not the end of IT. The idea that someday we're going to throw a switch and move everything out to an external cloud is neither a practical nor a realistic scenario - It just isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future.
Enterprises have billions of dollars invested in IT infrastructure. It will take several years to fully amortize and depreciate those assets. Cloud computing is simply one new part of the overall technology strategy - just one new tool in the CIO's toolbox. With external clouds, enterprises want to avoid lock-in and deploy their applications and data to one or more clouds - including internal or private clouds - that meet their needs in terms of security, scalability, compliance, cost, performance and latency.
Furthermore, these enterprises are not ready to migrate their most sensitive and business-critical assets to an external cloud under third-party management, particularly if their infrastructure, services, and data are shared with other customers. The lack of control over mission-critical assets and concerns about security and privacy are driving many enterprises to build their own private clouds.
Not surprisingly, our "Leaders in the Cloud" research study uncovered compelling evidence that the major adoption and growth in the cloud space will take place in private and hybrid clouds over the next three years.
In a typical large enterprise today, one finds a heterogeneous mix of platforms, including mainframes, databases, applications and services. Thousands of applications - at least 20-30 percent of which are mission-critical - still run on old-world hardware that is tightly coupled to other applications and infrastructure. Therefore, not all applications will be able to move to the cloud. Enterprise customers will pick and choose applications and their IaaS, PaaS and SaaS (*aaS) vendors based on their internal business needs and technical and architectural constraints thus creating a diverse and heterogeneous cloud environment.
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