March 2009 Archives

 It seems like there is a lot of concern over the Open Cloud Manifesto. Some people are up in arms over the way things are being handled. Apparently, a number of people have offered up their time (and willingness to fly to NY) to help with this meeting and been flatly denied any possibility of a voice. One of the former "instigators" of the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum  (CCIF) has been temporarily banned (whatever that means) and has taken a pretty hard stance against the way things have been handled. Rueven also made a statement today with a bit of an apology.

The much-heralded "Open Cloud Manifesto" produced by the CCIF is nothing more than a few pages stating the obvious.  

Sometimes, and this is one of those times, the obvious does need to be stated. 

The manifesto is "intended to initiate a conversation that will bring together the emerging cloud computing community (both cloud users and cloud providers) around a core set of principles."

Although Microsoft's Steven Martin is right to protest that the process was not open enough, it should be noted that Microsoft will join the the group on Monday and participate in future discussions.

Amazon has decided it won't play for now.  We've alluded to the rivalry between Microsoft and IBM/Sun earlier on this blog, but now it seems like Amazon is taking umbrage as well.

It seems as though the process was not open enough, or inclusive enough (which is the one thing I am sure of at this point) which gives rise to the suspicion that the manifesto is driven by self interest of a few rather than the needs of the many.

Let's look at the core set of principles set forth in the manifesto:

1. Cloud providers must work together to ensure that the challenges to cloud adoption (security, integration, portability, interoperability, governance/management, metering/monitoring) are addressed through open collaboration and the appropriate use of standards.

2. Cloud providers must not use their market position to lock customers into their particular platforms and limiting their choice of providers.

3. Cloud providers must use and adopt existing standards wherever appropriate. The IT industry has invested heavily in existing standards and standards organizations; there is no need to duplicate or reinvent them.

4. When new standards (or adjustments to existing standards) are needed, we must be judicious and pragmatic to avoid creating too many standards. We must ensure that standards promote innovation and do not inhibit it.

5. Any community effort around the open cloud should be driven by customer needs, not merely the technical needs of cloud providers, and should be tested or verified against real customer requirements.

6. Cloud computing standards organizations, advocacy groups, and communities should work together and stay coordinated, making sure that efforts do not conflict or overlap.

Nothing controversial here, except for IBM's fingerprints on this site.

Earlier on this blog I wrote:  Cloud Storage, like any other emerging technology, is experiencing growing pains. It is immature, it is fragmented and it lacks standardization. Vendors are promoting their particular technology as the emerging standard. While a standard doesn't exist yet, we are confident that one will emerge soon. We believe that a set of Web Services API based capabilities, accessed via non persistent connections on public and/or private networks, provides the fundamental frame of reference and definition for cloud storage.  The definition allows for both public service offerings and private (or enterprise) use, and provides a basis for expansion of solutions and offerings, versus a limitation.

Hopefully all of this back and forth will ultimately focus on more important topics, and we will make some progress.  We are committed to two things, giving realistic input to promote standards which drive cloud adoption, and implementing these standards once they are agreed on.  It will be far more productive to focus on these issues versus the intrigue and "spy versus spy" comedy that the current "Manifesto" launch is promoting. 

If I could offer one complaint, it is this:  if you want to achieve a standards-based approach, make it technical and philosophical if you like, but most of all, make it open and inclusive.

Here's an interesting interview with our friend Nick Carr in which he once again highlights important long-term strategic issues for enterprise IT.  I've pulled out some of his quotes for quick review:

- "..there is a basic conflict of interest that IT departments face as they think about the cloud, and that's true, of course, of any kind of internal department that faces the prospect of being displaced by an outside provider."

- "... if one of your competitors moves to more of a cloud operation and saves a lot of money, then whether your IT department likes it or not, you're going to have a competitive necessity to move in that same direction."

- "...People who are so plugged into social networks at home or at school, they're going to want those same capabilities at work. It's really driven by the user because it upsets the traditional IT apple cart. IT departments and staffers will generally drag their feet and then will play catch-up."

- "...That doesn't mean IT shops won't continue to exist and have important functions -- they might have even have some more important functions -- but it does mean that their traditional roles are going to change and they're going to have to get used to, I think, having a lot fewer people and probably having considerably lower budgets."

So what's a CIO to do? 

I wrote about how Bechtel's CIO embraced the Cloud. The CIO's IT infrastructure goals should be twofold: (1) the relentless pursuit of efficiency (i.e., operating costs for a given level of computing capacity) and (2) the search for reliability, flexibility and scalability in support of mission-critical data and applications.  Cloud computing and cloud storage solutions don't address these issues in all IT cases today, but the relevance of these progressive solutions applies to a greater and greater percentage of the IT pie with each passing month.  In other words, keep an open mind about the cloud.

Cloud computing won't go away, but Carr is right to say it's a long-term trend.  The hosting industry, broadly defined, has recently completed its first decade of life, and is now early in its second decade.  As one of the pioneers of the hosting industry, I agree with Carr's forecast that the Cloud Computing trend still has another 15 years or so to run full course.  But the opportunities for enterprise IT are very real now, and will continue to become more real - and more strategic - over time.

whurley talks about this as well in his blog post: "IT needs to get over its cloud denial, or management will get over IT."

Well said.

One more point of note. The NY Times reports: "In February, Salesforce reported a 34 percent rise in fourth-quarter revenue, to $290 million, and net income of $14 million, up from $7.4 million in the same period last year. The sales and earnings figures beat analysts' expectations."

Looks like the down economy is accelerating SaaS adoption.

The trust issue will not go away.

In a bit of a publicity stunt, the Electronic Privacy Information Center asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Google's Cloud Computing Services, specifically concerning:

a. the adequacy of Google's privacy and security safeguards regarding storage of personal information on its Cloud Computing Services; and
b. the sufficiency of Google's privacy and security safeguards in light of the company's assurances to consumers regarding its Cloud Computing Services.

The official document filed with the F.T.C. states:

This complaint concerns privacy and security risks associated with the provision of "Cloud Computing Services" by Google, Inc. to American consumers, businesses, and federal agencies of the United States government. Recent reports indicate that Google does not adequately safeguard the confidential information that it obtains. Given the previous opinions of the Federal Trade Commission regarding the obligation of service providers to ensure security, EPIC hereby petitions the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation into Google's Cloud Computing Services, to determine the adequacy of the privacy and security safeguards, to assess the representations made by the firm regarding these services, to determine whether the firm has engaged in unfair and/or deceptive trade practices, and to take any such measures as are necessary, including to enjoin Google from offering such services until safeguards are verifiably established. Such action by the Commission is necessary to ensure the safety and security of information submitted to Google by American consumers, American businesses, and American federal agencies.

P.R. stunts aside, where do we go from here?

Clearly, encryption, effective data anonymization, and mobile location privacy are "must-haves" in the cloud.  Hosting providers who deal with this issue will keep their customers' trust. And as I mentioned earlier, part of being a trusted service provider includes a commitment to how you will serve the customer, and positioning your business for success in your offerings.  It means a robust offering, with appropriate availability, backup, and of course, security.

Coming on the heels of the Cisco-BMC announcement, the news of an IBM/Sun merger and the simultaneous announcement of Sun’s Open Cloud Platform are not mutually exclusive events.  They’re all part of the ongoing race to capture the Enterprise Cloud. The elephants are dancing.  

The announcement continues the pattern of rapid marketplace adoption of Cloud Computing in general and that includes Web services API based storage access that began with Amazon and continued with Rackspace.  This space is really heating up.  More and more players are stepping up to challenge Amazon.

This tells us that IT hosting providers are running to get in the cloud storage and cloud computing game sooner rather than later. Having come from that space, I can tell you that this issue is top of mind in the hosting space. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and now Sun want to be the cloud for every customer. 

The hosting industry is ideally positioned to deliver cloud computing and cloud storage solutions to their existing and future customers.  Cloud Computing (see previous post on Cisco and BMC) is a service offering for which both hardware and software technology is rapidly developing.  Management tools are also coming online from many vendors.  The ability for the IT hosting industry to effectively compete will quickly be enabled by a new market segment, “Cloud Infrastructure Providers”.  When you combine the availability of solutions with the effective service oriented relationships that IT hosters have enjoyed with their customers, a significant opportunity is emerging.

The first act in Cloud Computing is underway.  Another character has entered the stage and received a round of applause.  They lend additional credence, and a call for more standardization, and less vendor lock in.  The key to the cloud will be ease of use, reliability, security, and of course, cost. 

With so much negative news on business and our economy, I find that Cloud Computing, and its new technologies and opportunities are very exciting.  This is how it has always felt in our industry, which we can change for the better, innovate like no one else, and create significant businesses and new opportunities.

Let’s dig a little deeper into the real story here: Sun’s open source vision and stated commitment to interoperability and its extension into Cloud Computing:

Ideally, users of cloud computing would be able to move their applications among a variety of standardized providers who offer open-source interfaces to common services. Today, most clouds are proprietary, and even where the components offered are open source, cloud operators cultivate significant lock-in through their underlying services, such as storage and databases.

Jonathan Schwartz explains on his blog:

This morning, Dave Douglas, the SVP of our Cloud Computing business, announced we’re building the Sun Cloud, atop open source platforms - from ZFS and Crossbow, to MySQL and Glassfish. With more than 4,000 developers hard at work on these enabling elements, and a twenty year history of network scale software innovation, we’re very comfortable with our technology lead. By building on open source, we’re also able to radically reduce our costs by avoiding proprietary storage and networking products.

Second, we announced the API’s and file formats for Sun’s Cloud will all be open, delivered under a Creative Commons License. That means developers can freely stitch our and their cloud services into mass market products, without fear of lock-in or litigation from the emerging proprietary cloud vendors.

Third, unlike our peers, we also announced our cloud will be available for deployment behind corporate firewalls - that we’ll commercialize our public cloud by instantiating it in private datacenters for those customers who can’t, due to regulation, security or business constraints, use a public cloud. We recognize that workloads subject to fiduciary duty or regulatory scrutiny won’t move to public clouds - if you can’t move to the cloud, we’ll move the cloud to you.

So where does IBM come in? 

If you read about Schwartz’s three strategic imperatives, you learn they are as follows:

1. Technology Adoption
2. Commercial Innovation
3. Efficiently Connecting 1. and 2.

Notice too, that Schwartz is brutally honest about Sun’s challenges with imperative #3:

With Sun’s current products, we could be selling to twice the number of customers we currently serve - our products appeal to an audience far greater than our customer base. But we’re limited by our size - our sales and partner force has a tenth the resources of our biggest peers.

So let’s review, Sun’s doing well on 1. and 2. with widespread adoption of “free” products like MySQL and Open Solaris, but lacks the sales and service firepower to execute on 3..

Did anyone say “IBM Global Services”?

And now, with the Cloud being touted as the future of IT, we see why a merger between IBM and Sun becomes a value creating proposition for both concerns.  Sun becomes the “low-cost” open-source provider, while IBM gets to feed its highly profitable (and nowadays hungry) professional services division.

Which leaves Microsoft’s Azure out in the cold. Small wonder that Bill Gates used to say that IBM, not Google, was Microsoft’s real competitor.

On a more technical level, the rationale behind this merger can be seen more clearly if you take a look at Troy Angrignon’s wonderful Cloud Computing Ecosystem Map v1.0. Scroll down and zoom into the map; the merger seems to make more sense at this level. When you combine IBM and Sun, the resulting “tessellation” of competencies is very impressive.

For more on this story, take a look at these columns by James Urquhart, Reuven Cohen, and Matt Asay.

As an end note, I’d like to state that this merger does not mean the race is over.

Far from it.

What we’re seeing is a new strategy developing across the IT industry. Hosting  companies, MSPs, and SaaS providers will still have to provide clouds of their own to compete against Amazon, Microsoft and Google. There has always been room for a number of providers for hardware, software and services, competing on price, value, and support. No one player need dominate the cloud computing space. Choice and competition always drives value and innovation.

And that’s where we’d like to help.

The recent strategic partnership between Cisco Systems and BMC Software has led to a lot of speculation. Here is my take on why this partnership makes sense from a technology and business perspective:

Any time someone serious about service delivery offers up their objections to the potential success of cloud computing, it goes something like this:  "the cloud is interesting for development and test, but you would not trust mission critical IT service delivery to a compute cloud."

Cloud Computing is truly utility computing - 120 volts (ok 220-240 volts in some countries) of IT service at every Internet outlet. For it to be successful, cloud computing needs to be completely transparent to the end user, a user should have the implicit belief that it will always be available; always be scalable and always be secure. The customer experience needs to be pleasant yet uneventful. Said differently, a customer should never be reminded that they are on a remote system.
 
Prior to Feb 18, 2008, it appeared that the Amazon EC2/ S3 combination was going to deliver just that. Developers who had developed their applications on this combo were now running their production environment in Amazon Web Services.  However, the outage experienced by Amazon changed all that. Start ups using Amazon Web Services realized their vulnerabilities and enterprises considering a move to Amazon started rethinking. Amazon did not respond effectively and reminded many of its customers that just being big did not make Amazon a "trusted provider."

While it was still a great option for application development, its viability for hosting mission critical applications was questionable.

So what happened? IT service whether being delivered locally or remotely hinges upon successful convergence of processing, storage, networking and management. Amazon obviously had the first three in place, but they were found lacking in management.




As Cisco makes rapid strides into the Cloud Computing world, they're intent on not making the same mistake. They wanted to make sure that they had ample support in the systems management arena.

So what makes BMC Software the obvious ally?

For starters, the core competencies of BMC Software and Cisco are complementary. Cisco manages the network and BMC brings expertise in the management of the data center. To its credit BMC has continued to be relevant and highly competent in a very formidable marketplace that includes the likes of HP and IBM.

BMC has managed to keep its edge in part because of its ability to successfully identify and assimilate startups that have been on the forefront in innovation. Strengthening its case as the partner of choice is BMC's expertise in ITIL, the de-facto framework for IT Service Management. In BMC, Cisco has a very strong partner as it moves into the Cloud Computing space.

Whether it goes beyond just a partnership remains to be seen.

Sure there’s plenty of room for discussion on the specifics, but the business benefits of Cloud Computing will make it an inevitable part of your future.  

Bechtel is a great example of the "enterprise cloud" version of Cloud Computing - building its own enterprise cloud rather than using a cloud computing service provider.

With projects in 50 countries around the world, and teams collaborating around the clock, Bechtel's challenge is to operate a seamless Project Service Network (PSN) authorizing employees, contractors, customers, and partners to access their global network with any device at any time through an Internet portal. There were two main challenges to IT service delivery: 1) the distributed nature of global project execution,  and 2) people - enabling collaboration between permanent and temporary employees, as well as vendors, customers, partners, even competitors.

It all began three years ago when CIO Geir Ramleth questioned the state of Bechtel's IT strategy.

He asked himself the classic strategy question: If you could build your IT systems and operations from scratch today, would you recreate what you have?

Instead of being satisfied with meeting or exceeding his industry's benchmarks, Ramleth decided to think bigger. According to this article, Ramleth researched 18 companies and developed benchmarks against many of them, including: YouTube, Amazon.com, Google, and Salesforce.com.

Why would a engineering and construction company like Bechtel even think about comparing itself to leading-edge Internet companies?  In his December 2008 keynote presentation at the Network World IT Roadmap Conference, Ramleth explained why.

We operate "as a service provider to a set of customers that are our own [construction] projects," Ramleth says. "Until we can find business applications and SaaS models for our industry, we will have to do it ourselves, but we would like to operate with the same thinking and operating models as [SaaS providers] do."

In his mind, Ramleth believed that "to bring SaaS-like services to our projects, we will have to become our own SaaS provider and possibly integrate with other SaaS providers." Bechtel would have to migrate its IT and its thinking from the bottom left to the top right corner of the service diagram below.

In other words, Ramleth isn't content waiting for SaaS and Cloud Computing offerings to work their way up from consumer-ready, to SMB-ready, to enterprise-ready.  Ramleth knows the underlying technologies can reduce his costs and increase his service levels now, but that integrating the right solution for an enterprise like Bechtel is the only remaining hurdle.  Ramleth took the pioneering step of clearing that hurdle himself.

After benchmarking Bechtel against the best, here's what Ramleth found:

- For the wide area network, YouTube was paying $10-15/megabit while Bechtel was paying $500/megabit. It was clear to Ramleth that Bechtel needed to entirely re-architect their approach to bandwidth capacity and adopt a more service-provider-like model.

- Google employed one systems administrator for about 20,000 servers whereas Bechtel employed one systems administrator per 100 servers. The reason? Google has a standardized server infrastructure, while Bechtel was customizing everything.

- Amazon sold storage to external customers for 15 cents/GB/month, while at Bechtel  costs were $3.75/GB/month. The difference could be explained by higher utilization levels at Amazon.

- Salesforce.com provides one version of one application for 1 million users. Upgraded four times/year with minimal downtime or training, whereas Bechtel ran 230 applications, up to five versions of each--nearly 800 different application versions altogether. Upgrades and training were constant with little or no version management.

The transformation was not easy. In 2007, Bechtel built three new standardized data centers --one in the United States, one in Europe and one in Asia--and began decommissioning the seven that it had just recently revamped.

In 1998, Bechtel had 35,000 sq ft of datacenter capacity across a distributed footprint. Today, less than 1000 sq ft of datacenter space is required for their virtualized foundation.  And, in today's virtual environment, servers are using an average of 70% of CPU capacity. Current savings on IT total spending was 25-30%.  Says Ramleth: "On top of all that it provides a massive simplification for the business!"

 "In the past we had brought the network to the data," adds Ramleth. "But with the PSN, we wanted to bring the data to the network. We moved closer to the traffic aggregation points."




The reaction from IT guru Nick Carr is on target: "For the largest enterprises, the very first step into the Internet cloud may well be exactly what Bechtel is doing: building their own private cloud to try to get the cost savings and flexibility of this new model... Large companies have such enormous scale in their own IT operations that the outside providers, the true utility providers, just aren't big enough yet . . . to make them a better option."

For his efforts, Ramleth is now honored in the CIO Hall of Fame, a fitting testimony to the vision and courage he has displayed. You can read more on Bechtel's cloud journey: Cloud Computing to the Max at Bechtel.

In my mind, there are several important takeaways from Ramleth's inspiring story:

1) CIOs must think like service providers: perhaps it's because Ramleth was the founder of a service provider - Genuity, that he has the right mindset - thinking of his customers as a service provider would.  Bechtel acquired Genuity in late 1995, taking it from start-up company to a leader in the Internet industry, and later selling it to GTE.

2) Cloud Computing is a competitive reality: if a traditional company like Bechtel can use cloud-computing to radically change the cost dynamics of its IT infrastructure, so can you!

3) The "Big Switch" is on: Author and provocateur Nicholas Carr is right - the big switch has begun. The sooner you start thinking about your roadmap, the better.

4) Service providers must offer cloud-based services: by now, alarm bells should be going off for IT hosting companies, MSPs, SaaS companies and yes, Telcos. If you don't have cloud-based offerings in your near future, you may not have a future.

5) Even in a recession, moving to the cloud makes sense: why spend money on capital expenditures when you can pay as you go? The cloud helps your bottom line, period.  And now is a great time to get started on your company's journey to the cloud.

HP Upline, Yahoo Briefcase, and AOL XDrive have already closed or are closing their online file services.  HP suffered a long outage recently, but in all likelihood their main reason for closing the business was a lack of short-term profitable financial results.  This is most likely the case for Yahoo.

These online file services are not easy to offer.  First, a competitive offering needs to be far more than just a place to store and retrieve files.  Second, the service needs to be bulletproof.  Finally, the service provider needs to be fully committed to the business.

In these difficult financial times, it is very easy for the financial organization of a large company to look at a service offering that is just one of many ventures, and quickly conclude that by shuttering the service, some short-term savings can be achieved.  Never mind the trust that the many users have already placed in the service, and the problems that ceasing the operation could cause, which range from inconvenience to loss of data.

Speaking of trust, Google just sent a notice to a number of users of its Document and Spreadsheets products stating that it may have inadvertently shared some of their documents with contacts who were never granted access to them. Ouch!

So who can you trust?

I believe that these cloud-based services can and should be delivered through a network of IT Hosting companies and managed service providers.  Why? Because they are closer to their customers and believe that their differentiation is their commitment to serving the customer.  A new service offering that can replace costly servers, brings significant value, and delivers savings to their customers will not be easily dismissed.

IT Hosting providers, managed service providers and VARs looking to provide such services should not shy away from doing so.  When considering the options for delivering online file services, they may want to consider the following.

First, how much control of the services will you really have? Things like SLAs, hosting, backend storage options and branding should all be factors in making this decision. Providers should want an offering that is truly differentiated and is easy to use in order to see real adoption.

Second, as a provider, you will want to look at the cost associated with service delivery.  Finding a real strategic partner in this area means finding one that will not only give you a very low cost of entry, but will share in the investment with a pricing model that monetizes services as you do.  And of course speed to market is also a must: getting to market quickly and generating immediate new monthly recurring revenue is a priority on everyone's business plan as we face the current economic situation.

In a recent article on the Gerson Lehman Group web site, entitled SaaS Offers Three Benefits for Tough Economic Times, (which is an analysis of the ComputerWorld article, In a down economy, SaaS revenues rise), the unnamed author outlines three key value propositions that are extremely representative of why providers will want to offer online file storage as a service instead of the traditional hardware alternative of a local file server:

1) No Capital Expense;
2) Variable Cost; and
3) Scalability.

"These benefits are tailor made to address the challenges businesses face now." The article goes on to say "This makes the three benefits of SaaS irresistible. Given the credit crunch and the uncertain outlook for any venture, it is important to try out new ventures without incurring large capital expenses. SaaS offers companies a way to get started without large up front costs."

So, being close to your customer and managing their IT needs should naturally include offerings that help replace the capital expense of file servers. It turns out that part of being a trusted service provider includes a commitment to how you will serve the customer, and positioning your business for success in your offerings.  It means a robust offering, with appropriate availability and backup.  It means a partnership that enables success, for the customer, the service provider, and the service enabler.

Although finding these types of partners may seem hard, there are companies beginning to emerge who address many if not all of these critical needs, you just need to know where to look.

The cloud isn't just for the big players. Look to the early stage and start ups to fuel not only solution innovation but business model innovation as well.

There's plenty of room in the cloud. 

Back in May of 2006, Amazon, introduced Simple Storage Service (S3) as file storage for their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing environment. Despite some  short-comings, the pricing flexibility and the web-scalability offered by S3 made it an instant hit with the software development community.

For the first time, a large pool of storage was available for use, with three significant attributes:  access via Web services APIs on a non persistent network connection, immediate availability of very large quantities of storage, and pay for what you use.

For many years, the Internet has been represented as a "cloud".  The term has now been extended to include the web scale computing capacity that is available via services offerings like Amazon EC2.  As a result the term "cloud computing" was coined, and includes files storage, referred to as "cloud storage".

As is the case with most nascent industries and technologies, there is no shortage of definitions.  Some are the result of vendors seeking ways to include their unique features in the discussion. Vendors offering online file sharing claim to have a cloud storage offering; others doing online backup stake their claim as cloud storage vendors; even companies offering enterprise clouds believe (at least in public) that they also have a cloud storage offering! This statement is very difficult to understand for some, and easy for others, depending on your definition.  We seem to have as many definitions for cloud storage as there are vendors and users.  However, it seems like the marketplace is beginning to coalesce around some basic requirements for a cloud storage definition.

In my opinion, notwithstanding the complexity of the technology, the concept of cloud storage is fairly simple and straightforward. Here is how I define it: cloud storage is storage accessed over a network (internal or external) via Web Services APIs.
 
What is interesting about this approach are the benefits it brings to the table.
By exposing storage through a Web Services API, cloud storage enables the application developer or user to connect to an abstracted layer of storage as opposed to the storage device directly. As you can imagine this simplifies integration and development, and facilitates the introduction of many desirable features and options.

Certain elements of cloud storage functionality drive the ability to rapidly scale the amount of storage available to any user.  Other capabilities enable a storage provider to bill for used storage versus allocated and available storage.  It is worth noting that these two commonly accepted features of cloud storage service offerings are as much associated with the service provider's business model as they are with some of the technological capabilities of cloud storage.   For this reason, we do not include these features in our definition.

Depending upon how it is deployed, cloud storage can be as simple as a place to store and retrieve files (thus the use of "simple" in the Amazon offering), but it can also be designed to provide advanced functionality. These advanced capabilities, available with the storage layer of the infrastructure, will ultimately differentiate cloud storage offerings and drive their consideration for use, but the specific features do not need to drive our definition.  It is important to note that these capabilities have a much more important role than simply differentiating vendor offerings, they will accelerate new applications, make mash ups easier, drive increased adoption of this approach to storage, and create new opportunities for the use of computing.  This is the classic, game changing result of innovation in our industry.  It is exciting, and timely.
 
Cloud Storage, like any other emerging technology, is experiencing growing pains. It is immature, it is fragmented and it lacks standardization. Vendors are promoting their particular technology as the emerging standard. While a standard doesn't exist yet, we are confident that one will emerge soon. We believe that a set of Web Services API based capabilities, accessed via non persistent connections on public and/or private networks, provides the fundamental frame of reference and definition for cloud storage.  The definition allows for both public service offerings and private (or enterprise) use, and provides a basis for expansion of solutions and offerings, versus a limitation.

Thanks for giving your consideration and input to our definition.

Hi and welcome to CloudStorageStrategy.com.  I’m Steve Lesem, the founder of this site, and co-founder, CEO and President of Mezeo Software, the developer of the leading deployable platform for cloud storage.

Our story begins a few years ago when Gray Hall and I worked together at VeriCenter - an industry leader in managed hosting, co-location, and IT outsourcing services.

Our customers came from across a wide range of industries, representing some of the world’s best-known brands, from Kodak to NASA.  We served businesses in a wide range of sectors - retail, health-care, government, energy, financial services, manufacturing, B2B, home-building, restaurants, and technology. We supported enterprise applications, Web sites, software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, disaster recovery solutions, and general business infrastructure. In 2007, VeriCenter was acquired by SunGard Availability Services.

At that time, we were aware of a new sort of challenge facing our industry - from outside entrants like Amazon.com who were beginning to grow their storage and web services businesses, based on their own internal technology. Cloud storage, as a significant part of an overall cloud computing strategy, as we saw it, was going to change our business and yes, our entire industry.  It seemed to us that while virtualization of the processing layer of the stack was serving our interests, there was a clear lack of an IT service-provider-ready cloud storage solution.

Amazon was first, but now major new entrants like Google and Microsoft, as well as veterans like EMC are delivering cloud-based offerings that are redefining the hosting and SaaS market even as we write these words.  The hosting industry, managed services providers, and even telcos are not exempt from this market redefinition. Your customers, enterprises both large and small, are part of this equation as well. We must let customers know what their options are, before they are captured by the industry giants who are attempting to define and own the cloud.

There is an additional trend that is, as yet, poorly understood and lacks definition.  New application functionality is moving into the storage layer of the infrastructure stack.  Developers will expect that additional services come with the cloud storage solution they use. This will go far beyond the capability to store and retrieve files.  And, it will include capabilities that extend well beyond management tools. Specific cloud storage services will ultimately be an expected part of cloud functionality.  We want to engage with our community and define these services. 

This blog is our response to this challenge.  We want to ask questions, discuss alternatives, and help shed some light on this emerging space. We hope to bring together industry thought-leaders, professionals, and vendors to: 

- Advance our collective knowledge of the definitions, trends, and technologies for cloud storage

- Discuss the business impact of cloud computing, and cloud storage in particular 

- Examine the strategic alternatives available to MSPs, IT Hosting companies, and telcos - i.e., how are business models going to change?

-Understand how small and medium businesses will be served

- Clarify the choices and use cases for large enterprises, and resolve the private versus public cloud debate, in a way that makes sense to business leaders

- Develop recommendations for creating a cloud storage discipline within your organization; present sample business justifications supporting cloud storage investments

- Define and understand the critical factors that contribute to improving the customer experience 

- Encourage discussions of lessons learned from cloud storage management practitioners

- Collaborate with vendors, businesses, and individuals to exchange ideas, create an online repository of “next” practices, and report on new developments as they occur

- Disseminate information on news, events, and relevant articles on a regular basis

- Create a framework for measuring cloud storage performance criteria

- Examine the critical security requirements for cloud storage

- Invite contributions from experts in the field to answer your questions 

In essence, we’re here to help you challenge traditional industry assumptions that are no longer valid. Will you join the conversation?

Gray and I believe this phenomenon called cloud computing represents both an exciting opportunity and a significant threat to the IT service provider industry. We’re working together again, at a start-up called Mezeo Software, providing solutions we believe will create additional opportunities for our customers, and most importantly, our customers’ customers.  At the end of the day, its all about giving customers options that make sense, new capabilities that truly create value, not just buzz about the latest thing.  We’ve all been talking about utility computing for years, 120 volts of IT at every outlet, and the next step in this transformation of our business is upon us. 

Our Bios

Gray Hall is Chairman of the Board of Directors at Mezeo Software. Gray is a veteran of the IT hosting industry, having co-founded VeriCenter in 1999 and serving as President and CEO until its successful sale to SunGard Data Systems in 2007.  VeriCenter was among the first full-service managed IT service providers in the U.S. market, and was a leading national provider of Enterprise Hosting solutions. Gray led VeriCenter from its start-up through 28 consecutive quarters of growth to $80 million in annual hosting revenue.  Most recently, Gray has served as Executive-in-Residence at Fidelity Equity Partners, a $500 million middle-market buyout fund backed by Fidelity Investments.  Prior to VeriCenter, Gray’s experience includes seven years with IBM, where he led the formation and launch of IBM’s Center for Scalable Computing Solutions in 1994, and several years in the venture capital industry including serving as Managing Director of Broadband Venture Partners, LLC and various roles with a number of early-stage IT hardware and software start-ups. 

Steve Lesem is the CEO and President of Mezeo Software, a Houston based software developer of the leading deployable platform for cloud storage. Prior to Mezeo, Steve was Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of VeriCenter. He has over 25 years of marketing and sales experience. Prior to joining VeriCenter he was Senior Vice President of worldwide sales for SafeNet, a Maryland based security technology firm. At BMC Software, a Houston based systems management software solution provider, Steve served in a variety of capacities, including VP channels and business development, Asia Pacific, and VP of Sales and Marketing for BMC’s Security Business Unit. Prior to BMC, he held multiple sales and marketing positions at IBM including General Manager, PC Server Sales and Marketing for North America. Steve earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.