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Austin, Texas - The Mezeo team has been at HostingCon this week.  This is our third time at this show, and each year we have seen the show grow and mature - reflecting the maturation of the hosting industry itself.

What we are observing at the show this year - and in the industry itself when we talk to customers - is a coming of age for the hosting industry and cloud storage.   Vendors and service providers truly "get it" now, and realize that they have to go to market with more than just a platform.  They need a solution that solves a customer problem. 

At the same time, we are seeing technologies maturing, more vendors coming to market with cloud storage offerings and more of what we refer to as "cloud enabling" solutions (i.e., solutions like TwinStrata's CloudArray and CTERA that target storage clouds).  The result is more solutions that help solve real business problems and help service providers push more data to the cloud.  
So, yes, the hosting industry continues to mature.  It's an exciting time to be in the industry and we only see great things to come.

1. Security will continue to be a big issue for the cloud, and, unfortunately, there will be at least one event this next year that is disruptive to Cloud Storage adoption, be it data loss or unauthorized data access.  Security will be an even more important point of evaluation for the use of specific Cloud Storage service offerings. The “trusted service provider“  becomes a requirement when selecting a cloud offering.
   
   
2. Cloud Storage will be characterized by a single word, “more”!  More adoption, more cloud storage offerings by more IT service providers, more variation in cloud capabilities, and more worries and concerns about the cloud.
   
   
3. The intersection of enhanced mobile devices with better wireless bandwidth will be combined with Cloud Storage to create exciting new work/life blended digital life applications. The user experience is of paramount importance.
   
   
4. Cloud Storage will see extraordinary adoption as a solution for backup, archiving and for policy-based georeplication for disaster recovery.

CloudStorageStrategy.com welcomes OpSource CEO Treb Ryan for an in-depth interview on cloud computing, from the perspective of the service provider.

NOTE: OpSource is a customer of Mezeo Software, the underwriter of this blog.

What are the opportunities you see in the cloud computing space, both for OpSource and your customers, and what impact has the downturn had on this?

It's interesting, but when people talk about cloud computing, they immediately go to the downturn and pricing - and cost being the big driver.  There's no question that cloud computing is cost effective, and it's accelerating adoption many times over, but what we're really seeing is something much more fundamental - a generation of users who are entering the workforce who've been using cloud computing all along; they've grown up on the Internet, and their interface to technology has always been through the Internet. 

As a result, this "Cloud Generation" has clear expectations of how technology should work:

1) it should be immediately available,
2) you do a search and get going,
3) it should be very flexible,
4) you should have ubiquitous access - anytime, anywhere,
5) sharing and collaboration - the expectation to collaborate and share anything they are working on.

This is not a generation which distinguishes between work data and home data - like my generation did. They've grown up with the concept of APIs and communities that grow around them; for instance, we see programmers who have grown up with Google and Facebook APIs, and now they expect that kind of thing in their work applications as well. So they're coming into the workforce and driving change in the workplace. They see technologies like client-server applications or hard-coded storage arrays pretty much the same way my generation saw green screens, mainframes, and mini-computers - as dated, inflexible, technology - hard to use, without nearly the power of cloud-based systems. So they have the day-to-day experience of the "consumer cloud" which they're now driving into business applications as well. 

To the Cloud Generation of programmers this means anything they can interact with on the Cloud they can program to through APIs. The idea of infrastructure being an item that can be addressed as part of the application, instead of something the application lays on top of, is a radical concept.  It has allowed not only for innovative applications, but also for true elastic computing making the Cloud environment even more flexible.



Great Cloud offerings have great communities around them. This is the aspect of Cloud computing that is so often missed - and even scoffed at - by the IT folks who think it's all about virtualization. One of the biggest gripes about Cloud computing is that support is done by the Community and not the vendor. While most will agree that far more proactive vendor support is necessary for Cloud computing, Community support is just as critical. For questions of configuration and usage tricks, the Community is a far better source of information than some call center employee with limited access. Often the Community devises more innovative solutions than the vendor ever could. And in addition to support, the Community can create third-party add-ins that make the Cloud even more useful.

The downturn has accelerated adoption from the top down as well.

We're seeing executives who have become enamored with this idea of the cloud - because of the ability to turn capital expenditures into operational expenses - and are pushing cloud computing into their organizations.  The CEO of one of our customers went so far as to tell his technical people - "now can you finally start using the cloud so I can get the board off my back?"

So, for different reasons, we have both top-down and grass-roots support for cloud-based applications, which makes this very interesting to say the least.

Which customer segments do you see leading the way in adoption?

Obviously, our traditional focus has been on ISVs and start-ups coming into Software-as-a-Service, business applications in the cloud, and we're seeing continued adoption of cloud infrastructure by those segments, but what has been interesting is that now that we offer the ability for any company to buy and use cloud infrastructure for any type of application, we're seeing a much broader spread of usage and adoption. Beyond the enterprise we also see widespread adoption by systems integrators, consultants, and VARs - upto 40% of our customer base - all without us targeting that segment at all.

How does OpSource differentiate its cloud offerings from other service providers?

We offer the best of the public cloud, combined with enterpise security and compliance, performance guarantees, and enterprise controls.

For instance, we offer:

• easy online sign-up & purchase with infrastructure provisioning in minutes
• pay by the hour and only for what you use, with no commitment (or purchase a monthly plan for a discount)
• a rich online community to share and collaborate with peers; get third party add-ins, images and configurations
• a web interface plus complete set of APIs

On the straight cloud, we provide a lot of the more robust, enterprise tools than you see from more consumer-based providers like Amazon, for example.

We focus on three different areas:

1) Security and Compliance: we provide a much more secure environment, because Opsource provides every customer with a Virtual Private Cloud within the public Cloud, allowing them to determine their own degree of public Internet connectivity. We also provide:

• Unique customizable security for firewalls
• VPN administration of all servers
• Unique username/password for each administrator
• Audit logs of all environmental changes
• SAS 70 audited
• 100% uptime SLA

2) Performance: we offer a multi-tier architecture with guaranteed latency in-between systems, sub-millisecond access time, industry standard technology, like VMware, instead of open-source, because that's where enterprise is comfortable.  Our 24/7 suppot also makes a diffence.

3) Control: today's cloud environment are single user environments, one user name and password, which is fine for individuals, but not so useful for the enterprise. We offer the ability to provision multiple users, do things like cross departmental billing, execute policy based control - which user can do what - and finally link all that back though an API to your existing management systems. So you can control how your users use the cloud same as you do your corporate datacenter.

So do you see any links into these large companies where they need to use ITIL for systems management?

Absolutely. OpSource has always focused on compliance as a major issue for our SaaS customers, eveything from SAS 70, PCI to European Safe Harbor, and even industry-specific ones like HIPAA, or government-specific certification, but in the cloud, we think about sophisticated  management techniques like federated authority and single sign-ons, and things like ITIL - while it's still in its infancy, it's shocking that most providers don't even have the ability to give their customers the critical capability to have more than one person manage the cloud for them - because they have a single user accounts. So while you can institute more sophisticated IT governance regimes like ITIL with the OpSource cloud, we give IT the capability to manage who does what, and track who did what, even if they aren't ready for something like ITIL.

So IT gets to do their own provisioning?   
  
Yes. So you want to know who provisioned what, how much it costs, and we give them that visibility instantly across their entire user community.  That way there are no surprises or charges they aren't aware of. It sort of reminds me of the controls I had to put in to alert me to my daughter's texting costs - so I'm aware of the charges before they get out of hand! I just blogged about this issue.

That's why you say that OpSource is what Amazon wants to be when it grows up... 

Absolutely.

And that's how you respond to cloud critics - the ones that say that the Cloud is not yet ready for the enterprise.

There are large parts of the cloud that are not yet ready for the enterprise. The cloud is still young, and it would be like asking that first 286 PC to run all of your corporate financials. However, a lot of these issues around enterprise adoption like security and compliance have been addressed, and are being taken care of, so as the cloud becomes more robust, we'll see increased adoption. We're seeing enterprise-level capabilities come to market that did not even exist six months ago.

We have just signed a partnership agreement under which OpSource will resell Gomez's Web performance management solution to our enterprise customers as well as use it to validate and monitor our own cloud performance service level agreements (SLAs). Through this partnership, we'll bring powerful performance monitoring to cloud computing, making it easier and more compelling than ever for enterprises to justify bringing their applications to the cloud.

Do you see infrastructure elements like storage growing now?

For true, full use of the cloud, we have to have the ability to access storage, go though the APIs to get to it, and give our customers a range of storage solutions, including cloud storage based on the specific application or need. We're giving our customers the widest range of choices.

What about agile programming? I heard you use agile methods to improve the customer experience.

Agile programming methods have helped us with not only development, but compliance and security as well. We talk to our customers to see how they are using our cloud offerings though our community, and we learn what's important to them.

We also test our offerings by having two programmers work on the same keyboard - literally  - one with the user story - so they can make sure that the customer is getting the exact functionality they need.

It's agile customer service.

Can you tell us a bit about your enthusiasm for composite applications (corporate mashups) and how they help your platform?

Of all the phenomenon in the cloud, we see the need for anytime-anywhere access and the idea that anything I can interact with I should also be able to program to.  So when Facebook enthusiasts start working in the enteprise, they bring their enthusiasm for integration as well.

So we see things in the cloud like direct access to the infrastructure as part of the application, which allows for all sorts of flexibility and robust usage.

We see real-time reporting applications of every kind you can imagine.  I myself am addicted to checking on everything that's coming out of our billing and customer systems tied into our Salesforce tabs.  So I'm always checking on the business in real-time via my iPhone.

I say this a lot, but integrating SaaS is a huge issue for today's enterprise. OpSource Connect can help SaaS companies -- of any size -- overcome integration hurdles and break out of the SaaS-only box. This speeds up adoption of SaaS in larger enterprise environments, opening the door for on-demand companies to cultivate business with large systems integrators. Plus, I'd say we're the only company providing Web operations from the ground up, addressing operational infrastructure, application management, and business operations. Today, integrations are expensive and one-to-one. For instance, while you can currently integrate your application with Google Maps as a composite application, OpSource Connect lets you integrate your app with many others, using just one platform. You can integrate your application with, for example, SAP, salesforce.com, Intuit QuickBooks, NetSuite, and a host of other SaaS and legacy applications. 

Everything is much more dynamic today, and programmers expect that. 

The announcement that Salesforce is integrating directly with cloud-storage Box.net is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the future of the cloud:

Techcrunch explains what Box.net is thinking:

CEO Aaron Levie says that this is the first step in Box.net's plan to give businesses a secure way to share their files across multiple services on the web. He says that many of the cloud services geared toward the enterprise don't work well together -- oftentimes you'll have to reupload the same content to multiple sites to share or edit it. Box.net wants to help unify these services by serving as the central hub for your uploaded files, which you can then access from these other web-based services. Levie hints that we'll be seeing more integrations with other services in the near future.

What we are witnessing is the future of enterprise IT infrastructure. We have been talking about programmatic access through RESTful APIs for some time now.  This move by Saleforce is an evolutionary step in how enterprise IT will manage its IT infrastructure - it will be a cross-cloud platform, with applications and open access to the storage cloud of your choice.

Security is not an issue, and the future is about cross-cloud collaboration.

Phil Wainewright says that Box.net wants to be the "Switzerland of Data" - he's right and wrong.  Cloud Storage, provided by the various service providers are going to be the "switzerland of data storage."  Vendor lock-in is going by the wayside.

ReadWrite is spot on when they say that "you can start to see how platforms will evolve into service networks - where enterprise users may subscribe and get access to applications that they pay for on a per use basis."

The biggest threat then, is to traditional software vendors, and applications like Sharepoint.  We will see heated debates on this very topic in the days and weeks ahead.

For some time now, we have been making the case that Cloud Storage is a disruptive innovation, a game changer in its category.

By stating this, we are of course employing  Clayton Christensen's now famous theories on disruptive innovation (refer to his books: The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, and Seeing What's Next)  His theory of disruptive innovation goes something like this:

Most companies innovate faster than their customers' requirements, and end up creating products and services that are too expensive, too elaborate, and even too inconvenient for use. They focus on "sustaining technologies" to  improve the performance of established products along dimensions of performance that their customers have historically valued. By doing this, they neglect "disruptive technologies," thus opening the market to low-end competitors, which compete on cost, convenience, and ease-of-use.  Over time these "disruptors" eat into the markets of the established players. The result?  According to Christensen, the established firms are "disrupted" by the upstarts, whose product and services are invariably cheaper, faster, and easier to use.  

As I read the countless opinions and articles on cloud computing and cloud storage, I keep coming across the mistaken belief that successful cloud services offerings will be delivered by very large companies, that have the capex and the scale to deliver large scale computing services.  I have blogged on two occasions about this issue (Microsoft: Losing Margins to the Cloud? and Trusted Service Provider ≠ "Big" Service Provider).

The common assumption is that the traditional IT vendors will be disrupted by cloud computing offerings from Amazon and Google.  The truth is, Amazon and Google may eventually impact this market, but they will not be the first to disrupt traditional IT service providers.Already we see hosting providers like Rackspace and SoftLayer provide their own suite of differentiated cloud offerings.



And what's more, companies like Mezeo can enable a relatively small IT service provider to quickly and efficiently deliver a cloud storage solution to their customers.  As such, many hosting companies, with significant expertise in delivering computing infrastructure capabilities, can quickly deploy and manage a service that is equal to or even better than currently available public storage clouds like S3 from Amazon, for example.

Our observation is that service providers around the globe are resolutely focused on deploying cloud computing services themselves, and they are in no way ceding this new growth market opportunity to the very few but large, significant providers. 

Cloud interoperability will also drive the delivery of many cloud-computing solutions.  We expect that you will see single name space solutions spanning multiple locations of a service provider, and, ultimately, the capability to interoperate clouds from different providers.  None of these capabilities suggest that we will see only a very few service providers.

Christensen defines the characteristics of disruptive technology as follows (Innovator's Dilemma, p. 234):

-    they are simpler, cheaper, and lower performing
-    they generally promise lower margins, not higher profits
-    leading firms' most profitable customers generally can't use and don't want them
-    they are first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets

If you read what Microsoft's Ray Ozzie says about how Cloud Computing diminishes margins for Microsoft, or read about Larry Ellison's about-face on Oracle's entry into Cloud Computing, we see that Christensen's model predicts the evolution of our market - the same patterns apply; history it seems, will repeat itself.

Solutions like Mezeo enable the IT service provider community to deliver public cloud computing and Public Cloud Storage solutions, today.  No one told either technology or IT service providers that they should not do this.  The cloud is coming to you, and it is brought to you by the IT service provider community.  

Recently, The Planet published a white paper comparing Cloud Storage performance as offered by The Planet (which uses Nirvanix), Amazon S3 and Rackspace CloudFiles.  It did a nice job of creating a performance-oriented benchmark, comparing Cloud Storage file upload and download time for the three services.  While it is necessary to understand this factor associated with Cloud Storage, it is far from sufficient and much more is needed, if one wants to begin assembling metrics and from these make business and technology decisions.

While this does paint The Planet's offering in a very positive light, one has to question the pertinence of the actual test. (Knowing how our offering would have performed in the specific test, as the CEO of Mezeo, I am a bit disappointed that we were not included in the test) Of course, at the end of the day we have to remember that this is after all a test conducted by one of the vendors who also somehow turned out to be the winner. A third party validation of the results would certainly be more credible. To that end we are assembling a slate of comparisons and seeking third party verifications, and hope to publish these results in late summer. 

A notable omission in the test was the comparison of the price per GB of the storage. Based upon published prices, The Planet offering is significantly more expensive than the others. 

This  introduces the idea of price performance, and that is very applicable, since many Cloud Storage use cases do not contemplate that the accessing server is housed in the same data center as the Cloud Storage solution it is accessing.   When access via the Internet is contemplated, the specific speeds of upload and download as revealed in the aforementioned test may be less pertinent, whereas price or other features may be the major differentiator of note.

How about the following metrics:
 

• availability: a fact based measurement
• reliability: based on the SLA offering 
• ease of Web Services API access: length and complexity of required API usage against a defined set of standard actions
• access methods: WebDAV, NFS, CIFS
• security
• feature/function richness and differentiation: sharing and collaboration, available clients, tagging, geo capabilities
• utility billing: true pay for use and on what time frames and at what minimums, and ultimate scalability (how much storage is immediately available). 
  

All or any of these may be highly pertinent to a Cloud Storage decision. 

And finally, how about running the test enough times so that the results are reliable and meaningful? Running the test for a total of four times and concluding that Amazon S3 has a 90+% variance is a bit of a stretch.

Please do not take this blog post as being too critical; I am grateful that The Planet is signaling a degree of market maturity as real, meaningful discussion of Cloud Storage attributes are brought to the marketplace.  The Planet is to be congratulated for elevating the discussion.  Now all Cloud Storage service providers, and infrastructure providers who enable storage cloud offerings, need to begin the hard work of defining the metrics, and publishing the results.

It is very interesting that we are still working out the definition of Cloud Storage and now we are faced with benchmarking competing service offerings.  The Cloud Storage marketplace is growing rapidly, and all of us are engaged in bringing this new capability to market. 

Thanks for reading this post, and stand by, more on this topic coming soon. 

When Gray Hall and I launched this blog, our first entry included this statement:

“…this phenomenon called cloud computing represents both an exciting opportunity and a significant threat to the IT service provider industry.” 

Not all service providers possess the in house capability, or desire, to build the raw infrastructure to deliver a cloud computing service.  Almost all of them do, however, know they need to deploy an advanced cloud computing solution, and are looking for partners and solutions to speed their offerings to market.  They are doing what they do best, integrating offerings into a cohesive service delivery stack, based on their vision for their current and future customers use of cloud computing.  Many do the real customization in the integration of the various infrastructures, designed to meet specific needs.

While we started CloudStorageStrategy.com a couple of months ago, this story began in April 2008, when we coalesced our ideas on the need for deployable cloud computing infrastructure for the IT service provider industry, and started Mezeo (a platform for the deployment of cloud storage).  With the launch of CloudLayer, our vision of the marketplace requirements for the delivery of cloud computing by IT service providers goes from theory to fact.  

CloudLayer from Softlayer provides a new, significant, differentiated offering in the cloud computing service provider market space, one that will gain consideration versus Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Mosso, as well as others. 

Mezeo provides the cloud storage infrastructure that is utilized by SoftLayer as part of the CloudLayer offering.  Other suppliers, as well as SoftLayer’s automation and integration, yield the competitive offering.

Everybody wins!  Customers have additional choices.  Service providers will differentiate with service level, features, and price.  Many new infrastructure offerings will race to the market, enabling clouds to be built by many service providers.  

Two things I believe we can be sure about are as follows: 

First, we still have a lot of sorting out to do on the subject of standards, and how the infrastructure offerings will integrate.  This is significant work, and it will enable cloud service offerings to be easily deployed and customized.   

Next week, SNIA is hosting a meeting about standards and APIs associated with cloud storage. The SNIA has created the Cloud Storage Technical Work Group (TWG) - the primary technical entity for the Association to identify, develop, and coordinate system standards and interfaces for cloud storage. Read more about the SNIA Cloud Storage TWG, and join a SNIA Cloud Storage Group today! 

Unlike the manifesto, this is an open forum, with proven processes from which serious and helpful guidance will likely emerge.  

Second, suppliers are readying offerings that range from integration of virtualized processing to file storage, database, billing and provisioning.  Many IT service providers are in different stages of deploying their competitive cloud computing service offerings.  Competition will increase, and opportunity will accrue to those who quickly and effectively master the deployment and management of these offerings.  

In a conversation last week, I was asked a reasonable question: Why did I think IT Service providers of many sizes and skills can take on Amazon Web Services and Rackspace?  Why wouldn’t these two large companies just take over the market for cloud computing services?

I have seen the answer, and it is CloudLayer.  Today, people are looking at CloudLayer as a new option in the cloud computing service provider space.  They’re checking it out, considering it for new solutions.  You should check it out to!

The way ahead tells us that the lines between the business and the consumer experience are blurring.  We saw that, for example, in the Bechtel case study we blogged about. 

Bruce MacVarish tells us a good portion of this story, and his diagram is a good indicator of where we're headed. 

Add to this the voice of our friend Tim O'Reilly, who's been telling anyone who will listen that "it's time to start thinking of the phone as a first class device for accessing web services, not as a way of repurposing content or applications originally designed to be accessed on a keyboard and big screen." 

I can't agree with him more. 

So where are we today? 

What does the cloud user experience look like at this point in our journey?

The basic promise of cloud computing: instant access to your data anytime, anywhere, on any device, is already a reality:

Here are some of the must-haves as we see it for the end-user experience, be it business or consumer:

• Upload multiple files of any type: (documents, presentations, PDFs, Website images, videos, music and more) Files of any type and size can be uploaded, stored and instantly shared.
• Real-time access to stored files, with trusted service providers hosting your data.
• Collaborate and share files with anyone--inside and outside an organization. Users must be able to securely share files with vendors, customers, family and friends, all without having to have an account or moving files from their stored location. Control of  customer data is where it belongs - with the customer.
• Hierarchical and tag-based file organization: hierarchical and tag-based file system organization and storing with library file views for easy search and retrieval.
• Permission Management: Role-based permission management and share expiration lets you manage your private and public shared data.
• Notifications: Account holders and non-account holders get notifications when files/folders are shared or when they have been assigned to a collaborative project. Notifications of shares to non-account holders leverage a viral marketing element to invite recipients to get involved.
• Publish-able URLs: users must have the capability to generate public URL links to share and publish files on forums, blogs and websites (of course, they must also be able to share files securely, in private).
  
• End-to-end security: data must be secure both in transit and at rest.
  
• Data security and control: use 256 bit AES encryption for each stored file with SSL encryption for files in transit. That takes care of the basic security fears for business users and consumers. Why should one be less secure than the other?
• Online restoration of deleted files: Users should be able to delete and restore files right from the web.
  

The good news? We can do that today.

And what's next? 

Here's what O'Reilly says about the future of mobile:

a sensor-rich device with applications that use those sensors both to feed and interact with cloud services. The location sensor knows you're here so you don't need to tell the map server where to start; the microphone knows the sound of your voice, so it unlocks your private data in the cloud; the camera images an object or a person, sends it to a remote application that recognizes it, and retrieves relevant data. All of these things already exist in scattered applications, but eventually, they will be the new normal.

Get ready. The cloud user experience promises to change the way we live and work.

Side note: We'll also be discussing the semantic Web and the requirement for tagging capabilities in cloud storage, but let's save that discussion for a future post dedicated to just that topic.

 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.

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.