ParaScale

Private cloud isn’t a new market

Private cloud is a touchy subject these days. Proponents say it’s inevitable, detractors say it’s all marketing. Enterprises, who are supposed to be clamoring for it, are cautious: hearing endless pitches from endless different angles will do that.

“We only have ourselves to blame,” said ParaScale CEO Sajai Krishnan. He said, month over month, more than half the people he pitches to say they’ve come to learn about cloud and cut through the hype. He said that enterprises are hearing about cloud, but what they’re hearing is, ‘do everything a different way’, and that’s not attractive.

Cloud is pitched as easy, cheap, low-investment, cures cancer and feeds the poor, etc., but the reality is that for a large organization that’s not going to use Amazon or Rackspace, private cloud means changing the way your business runs. Maybe for the better, but that’s real work.

Enterprises are told “’Here is cloud infrastructure and now you can have it in-house’ – that’s a big change from something that used to be fairly stovepiped,” said Krishnan. Private cloud enthusiasts promise efficiency, but what the enterprise hears is ‘they want to sell me more stuff to cram in there’.

Krishnan thinks this complexity slows down private cloud adoption. Unless it’s your business, a la Amazon or Rackspace, building or re-directing a data center into a self-service automated, fully virtualized compute cycle utility is weary and expensive work. A company that does that will spend years doing it and years realizing the return. It’s not the technology; you can get a cloud for free on Ubuntu now- it’s the planning, and procedural changes.

All well and good for a Web 2.0 enthusiast to start up a business on his or her laptop with Amazon; but convincing 10,000 developers they have to use a new business process is quite another. Krishnan says the other pressure is that enterprises are conservative, and what they have is working. It’s not impossible, it’s just a lot slower than many have speculated, he said.

Intuitively, this makes sense. I can’t poke any holes in Krishnan’s reasoning. The timeline for private cloud is going to look a lot more like the infrastructure lifecycle, than a booming new marketplace. So watch those private cloud startup ideas, kids. There’s less room in here than you think.

Product release round-up

What follows is a semi-regular exposition on all the products announcements we can’t cover in longer form, kids. They’re all interesting technology, really neat in some cases, strategically interesting in others, but SearchCloudComputing.com really needs to show how real people are using said awesome technologies, and what’s really driving that use. That takes time and reporting, so stuff gets left in the mailbag and interviews get left on the floor. Hopefully we can push all the interesting stuff that won’t be a story into this kind of post from time to time.

For instance , I spoke with newly minted VP of cloud computing at CSC, Brian Boruff. CSC is a big ($16.7 billion, 92,000 employees) consulting firm, and is opening a cloud computing division. The only real thing they can offer you so far is ‘cloud orchestration consultants’ who will come in and take care of the nuts and bolts using dozens, if not hundreds of other peoples’ technologies in your business — making sure they all meet whatever regulatory needs you have, auditing and compliance and so forth. CSC is rustling up an “alliance partner” to resell a standard package of cloud services and IaaS later on this year. Boruff commented on the rapidly evolving cloud market, saying “we are the only large player that’s technologically independent — we don’t sell [hardware], we don’t sell software”, so he feels CSC will have some influence on what becomes “cloud standard.” Unless it guesses wrong, of course.

SOA software maker TIBCO announced a management-minded suite for developers who really want to play in the cloud but have pesky, grumpy IT managers with governance needs. TIBCO Silver will make sure the “operations guy understands everything that” that developers do in the cloud, even after the fact, say spokesman Phillip Tree. It does this by automating a slew of governance functions, like performance monitoring, version tracking, logging, etc. It allows formalized test environments to be set up, so developers can play in TIBCO Silver/Amazon EC2, and then take their work to the SOA boss, who can in turn start an official dev cycle with a minimum of shouting and headaches.

Managed services firm IP Services is using application virtualization from InstallFree to provide regulatory compliance to applications in the cloud. Given that you’re paying IP Services good money to hang on to your apps and data, one assumes that they are using InstallFree to ensure compliance in their own virtualized, multihomed environment, not farming your goods out to EC2 or something.

Open source Java Virtual Machine scalers Terracotta announced a partnership with VMware. Customers can virtualize everything on VMware, develop JVMs within Terracotta and presumably hold a raffle for all the servers they don’t need any more, as customers, one presumes, port their VMware images to compatible public clouds. While that’s neat, what this really is another arrow in proprietary VMware’s quiver against a cloud market dominated by open source.

Two gentle ribbings:

Cloud software vendor ParaScale released a “TCO calculator,” but it doesn’t seem to work, and there are no instructions. So, that wasn’t well thought out.

Hosting firm REDPLAID (subsidiary of Connectria) has decided that having a shopping cart on its website and offering VMware machines for rent constitutes a public cloud. Honestly? Maybe the on-demand billing, self-service portal, repository of machine images and scalable resources are on the roadmap, but this might constitute band-wagon jumping to more cynical observers.