CloudSwitch’s software lets users move applications, or workloads, between company data centers and the cloud without changing the application or the infrastructure layer. This notion of hybrid cloud, or connecting on premises IT with public cloud services, turns out to be the preferred approach for most companies considering cloud computing.

CloudSwitch has proven its software is an enabler of this model and has a dozen or so large enterprises, including Novartis and Biogen, using its product to move workloads to the cloud and back in-house, if necessary.

The new offering, available in the US only, is designed to be up and running in eight weeks, a much faster turnaround than traditional SAP installations that can take months. It’s priced on a per user per month subscription which Verizon said should work out at about $100 per seat. There’s also an implementation fee of $80,000 to $220,000 depending on which modules the customer wants.

SAP has other products in its RDS bag including supply chain, product development and HR software that Verizon expects it will also sell as cloud-based services at some point.

It’ll be interesting to watch and see if Verizon gets any traction selling this SaaS offering. It has enormous network reach and is developing cloud infrastructure anyway, so there’s very little financial risk in it selling Software as a Service.

For SAP, building out cloud infrastructure to sell its applications as a service would be super expensive, better to partner with the major network operaters and let them sell it for you.

Salesforce.com is the main competition here with several years head start. Can the old guys catch up?

No doubt landing one of the top telecom providers in the world is a coup from a PR perspective, but so far the partnership is a big paper tiger if you’re an IT shop looking to do anything real with this news.
The press release claims that, with “the click of a mouse,” customers can expand their internal VMware environments to Verizon’s Compute as a Service (CaaS) offering built on VMware vCloud Data Center, for instant, additional capacity. The overall effect is referred to as a hybrid cloud.

The immediacy and ease touted here is far from true; ironically, I learned this during a session at VMworld entitled “Cloud 101: What’s real, what’s relevant for enterprise IT and what role does VMware play.”

The speaker said that to move a workload from internal VMware resources to a vCloud service provider such as Verizon is currently a manual process. It require users to shut down the to-be-migrated workload, select the cloud you’ll deploy it to, then switch to the Web interface of that service provider and import the workload. I am leaving out a bunch of other steps too tedious to mention, but it’s hardly the click of a mouse!

In a follow-up conversation after the session, VMware said the missing feature that will allow automated workload migration, called the vCloud client plug-in, was still to come. No timeframe was given.

And this isn’t all the smoke and mirrors from Verizon; the telco claims its CaaS is the first cloud service to offer PCI compliance. This statement isn’t quite either because the current PCI standard, v1.2, does not support virtual infrastructures. So a real cloud infrastructure (a multi-tenant, virtualized resource) cannot be PCI compliant. The PCI Council is expected to announce v2.0 of the standard at the end of October, which will explain how to obtain PCI compliance in a virtual environment.

A word of advice to IT shops investigating hybrid cloud options: Be sure to play around with the service before you buy. In many cases, these offerings are still only half-baked.

Having now had a nice talk with real live Amazon people, it seems they are treating it mostly as a public relations problem, and the real issue is transparency.

You see, for Amazon watchers, the Holy Grail is to find out exactly what and where Amazon’s servers are. But Amazon isn’t keen on handing out details, likely because the reality is messy and because they might be making it up as they go along. Those Amazon watchers might want to relax. Sure, Amazon is a going concern, but it doesn’t have the kind of scratch or incentive to re-invent the wheel server like Google or Microsoft do.

Further hurting Amazon’s cause is that most hosting companies are more than happy to tell you what they run. Verizon, for instance, recently boasted about its new “CaaS” hardware. Pricing also starts at $250/month, and that’s before you fire up a single server.

Amazon is trying to run away from that game and focuses on delivery. But after a certain point, people do really care about the nuts and bolts, since unlike semi-durable consumer goods, an EC2 instance is an ongoing concern, and users want to understand how their application is staying up (I know — so last century, right?).

I did have a chance to ask about Amazon’s hush-hush data center facilities. I didn’t get much more than a general admission that “Availability Zones” are usually located in different data centers, and that there are four in the US as of June 9. Amazon was also apparently startled to discover that one facility had electrical exposure to the Great Outdoors. That’s still progress. Hopefully, there’ll be more. I’m waiting, and I know lots of others are as well.