Image via Wikipedia

Last week, open standards body OASIS unveiled yet another shiny new standards effort. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee hopes to make it “easier to deploy cloud applications without vendor lock-in,” and to support moving from one cloud to another. The usual suspects — the likes of IBM, CA, and Cisco — are on board. The usual holdouts — Google and Amazon, of course — are not. So what is TOSCA trying to achieve? How does it fit alongside all the dead, dying, or ponderously deliberating cloud standardisation efforts that have gone before? And without the giants of the cloud, is there really any point bothering?

As I’ve probably mentioned before, involvement in various national and international standardisation efforts played a big part in my early career. I went to the working group meetings in odd (but often beautiful) locations. I participated in the conference calls. I engaged on the mailing lists. I drafted and edited and reviewed the documents. I completely buy into the idea that there is a place for foundational standards, developed through consensus-building and maintained for the long haul by organisations that stand apart from the vested interests and their competing agendas.

I also believe that there’s a time and a place for these standardisation efforts. Do it too soon, and we end up ossifying something that needs to be in a state of flux. When you don’t know what the best way to prepare a meal is, it’s too soon to print the recipe book. We need to try different approaches, and we need to be able to throw away the attempts that didn’t work out. More worryingly, standardisation efforts can be used for political ends. They can be little more than a rod with which to beat the (usually dominant) competition. At best a distraction, or a talking shop for those unwilling or unable to just get on and do something. At worst, one amongst a toolchest of dirty tricks in a broader war for hearts, minds, and — ultimately — wallets.

The cloud market is a fascinating place. There are leaders and there are followers. There is innovation, and there is competition. There is agreement, and there is debate. For all the rhetoric, and all the posturing, we really don’t yet know the right answer to many of the cloud’s questions.

Maybe TOSCA and the Open Data Center Alliance and IEEE and the rest are — still — too early, and should be content to let the market thrash out a few more of these issues before anyone tries to write anything down? And when it is time to write some stuff down, let’s make sure we focus on specific, finite, tangible, atomic tasks rather than “the cloud.” As Dave Roberts commented in regard to TOSCA’s scope;

“That goal is so large, that I think it’s probably unbounded. When problems get unbounded, the best you can ever hope to achieve is to solve a large enough subset of the problem that the solution is still interesting. If you can’t achieve that, people ignore the solution because it fundamentally doesn’t help them. There is always an ‘interesting’ part of the problem space that they have to solve a different way, and that undercuts the use of the partial ‘solution.’”

And as for Tosca? Things didn’t end well for her, did they? Might TOSCA’s fate, too, be sealed?

Related articles

• Tech giants back standard for cloud portability – InfoWorld (infoworld.com)
• Proposed spec aims to nix cloud lock-in (gigaom.com)
• On TOSCA and Cloud Standards. MyPOV (diversity.net.nz)

San Jose-based Cirtas emerged from stealth back in September 2010 with a $10 Million (€7.86 Million then) Series A funding round, their novel Bluejet hardware appliance, and the backing of Amazon.

Today they’re back, with a new CEO and another $22.5 Million (€16.6 Million) in the bank. The Series A investors — New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Venture Partners and, unusually, Amazon — are joined by Shasta Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners for a Series B round that positions the company for some rapid growth.

Cirtas’ Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller is a hardware appliance, deployed in the data centres of medium and large enterprises to simplify the task of integrating existing on-premise Tier 2 and Tier 3 storage with disparate Cloud-based solutions such as Amazon’s S3, EMC Atmos, Iron Mountain and AT&T’s Synaptic Storage as a Service.

Talking ahead of today’s announcements, new CEO Gary Messiana suggested that Cirtas’ decision to deliver a hardware appliance rather than a software-based solution reflects their deep understanding of both their customers and the sales channel. Messiana is not the first to suggest that buyers of enterprise storage are a conservative bunch, and he’s certainly not criticising that conservatism; when business continuity depends upon the decisions you make and the systems you buy, you’re hardly going to take unnecessary risks, now are you? A piece of physical hardware that you can see, touch (and even hug) delivers an element of familiarity that appears to appeal to enterprise-class customers taking the first steps to leverage Cloud-based storage within their existing solutions portfolio. With Bluejet, Messiana suggests, control continues to reside inside the data centre. The Cloud provider(s) to which the appliance directs data are simply (dumb?) utilities upon which the enterprise may choose to draw in a manner abstracted by Cirtas’ technology. A hardware solution also suits the channel-based (rather than direct sales) model by which these companies tend to buy. As Messiana notes,

“[much of] the money changes hands in the channel… and [channel partners] know how to sell tin.”

Formerly an entrepreneur in residence at Series B participant Bessemer, Messiana talks persuasively about the clarity of proposition and go to market strategy that drew him to Cirtas. Drawing upon pre-Bessemer experiences as CEO of traffic optimising Netli (acquired by Akamai in 2007), Messiana argues that the shift off-premise makes expertise in moving data just as critical as the data storage skills of incumbents. Might Akamai, Limelight and their ilk make inroads into this market, at the expense of EMC, HDS, 3Par et al, I wonder?

In storage as in so much else, big incumbent enterprises are very different from smaller or younger companies. Whilst startups and SMEs might be quick to embrace entirely virtual solutions — often starting in the Cloud rather than migrating to it from elsewhere — the ‘multi-billion dollar corporations’ served by Cirtas will almost inevitably follow a very different path. Across Pharma, HR, manufacturing, publishing, insurance and finance, Messiana reports that customers with market caps of $500 Million – $10 Billion and more are flocking to the company.

So why take more VC money, so soon, and dilute the company? Messiana insists that “plenty” of the initial $10 Million is still in the bank, and that VCs were falling over one another in their enthusiasm to invest. The deal was apparently closed rapidly, with an aggressive valuation that sees “minimal dilution” whilst giving Messiana the cash to expand sales, support, and other areas of the company.

Cirtas would appear to be off to a good start, but it would be dangerous to be complacent. The company is not alone in seeing hardware as a way to encourage enterprises toward the Cloud, and there are plenty of software-based cloud storage gateways waiting for the opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities as those conservative CIOs become more willing to trust the Cloud. And then there’s Amazon. What might they do next?

Related articles

• Nasuni grabs cloud development cash (go.theregister.com)
• Enterprise Poll: Do You Use Cloud Storage? (readwriteweb.com)
• F5 Friday: F5 ARX Cloud Extender Opens Cloud Storage (devcentral.f5.com)
• The $20 Million Club: 10 Well-Funded Cloud Startups (nytimes.com)

I’ve been a fan of Om Malik‘s boutique analyst site, GigaOM Pro, pretty much from the outset, and happily renew my subscription each year. The site covers a wide range of industry topics, and those Quarterly Wrap-ups are worth the fee all by themselves.

I’ve written a few reports for them in the past, but was delighted when Mike Wolf got in touch to see if I fancied trying my hand at curation on their Infrastructure/Cloud channel.

So next week (from 31 January) I’m going to be gathering and commenting upon links from around the web, writing a daily ‘Today in Infrastructure,’ and finishing off with a Weekly Update. If you’re not (yet!) a subscriber, why not sign up for a free seven day trial and join me for the start of my little adventure?

If there’s something you think I should be covering, do let me know.

Related articles

• Free GigaOM Pro Webinar: The Scalable Cloud (gigaom.com)
• GigaOm raises $2.5M, claims 10,000 Pro subscribers (venturebeat.com)
• The Cloud has a place, even inside heavily regulated industries (cloudofdata.com)
• Talking Scalable Clouds with GigaOM Pro and Limelight Networks (cloudofdata.com)
• GigaOM Structure 2011 (datacenterknowledge.com)
• Join GigaOM at Big Data on March 23 in New York City (gigaom.com)

I don’t think I’ve ever really been convinced by the argument that everything will end up in the data centres of Amazon.

The straightforward provision of commodity Cloud Computing is an important – and growing – area, and one that will continue to expand as interfaces become simpler, FUD is challenged, and prices maintain their relentless march towards the bottom. Everyone has something they could usefully, sensibly, and cost-effectively run in a commodity Cloud such as those offered by Amazon, Rackspace, Flexiant, and others. In this space, basic stability, security and reliability combine with a compelling – and diminishing – pricing proposition to create commodity services targeted squarely to lowest common denominator functionality. Here, market forces may (inevitably?) lead to an eventual reduction in the number of providers. Cost, although not the only consideration, is both important and compelling. Although markets like competition, there may even be a single winner here, one day.

Layered all around the basic, routine, grunt-work computation that these commodity public clouds handle so well, many organisations find themselves having to cope with a wide range of other use cases and data sets. Some require specialist hardware (like the GPUs that Amazon has recently begun selling access to). Some demand particular regulatory and legislative hoops to be jumped through. Some have quirky requirements around latency in data transfer or speed of in-CPU processing. Some have lots of data, and issues with regard to getting the stuff from one location to another with a sensible balance between transfer cost and time.

All of these are certainly capable of being addressed in the Cloud, but the economics and the business rationale begin to shift. For the data owner, cost may no longer be quite so significant a factor. Reliability may matter more, or speed, or the audit trail. For the Cloud provider, these requirements no longer look like the lowest common denominator. It’s not cost-effective to provide these capabilities to everyone and still keep the price low. It becomes more sensible to segment, to divide, and to create bespoke offerings of various kinds. Some of these services require such specific things in terms of network topology, physical building layout, and staff expertise that it may even become counter-productive to have these services in the same building as the commodity Cloud. Here, there’s plenty of room for new entrants, plenty of scope for competition, and plenty of opportunity to differentiate in terms of price, location, support, and a host of other factors. This segment of the Cloud is only just getting started.

In these contexts, we see compelling arguments made for on-premise private clouds, off-premise private clouds, hybrid clouds, community clouds and the rest. Some of the arguments made in favour of private and hybrid certainly are part of the FUD we see in this space, but beneath the noise, the security scares, and the vested interests of SysAdmins and sellers of data centre components, there lies a grain of truth. Not everything is most sensibly run on a cheap VM, rented from Amazon (or Rackspace, or whoever) with your credit card, and physically located half way round the planet.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to make sensible decisions about which type of cloud works best in each situation, and large swathes of the market are doing everything in their power to add to the confusion.

Having accepted that the basic offering from a public cloud provider is not the solution for my particular requirements, where do I turn next?

Do I listen to the (convincing) pitch from a vendor of ‘community cloud’ solutions for my domain? If I’m in Healthcare, they come with HIPAA and European Data Protection Directive, and all sorts of other accreditations. For dealing with sensitive patient data, this may be just what I need… but does the wily salesman also persuade me to run staff email and the hospital volleyball club website on this over-specified (and expensive) infrastructure?

Do I listen to the (convincing) pitch from a vendor of virtualisation software? If I’ve got a reasonably sized data centre with some life left in it, I may see the value of virtualising all of that expensive hardware, and running current applications in house more efficiently. But instead of gradually reducing my in-house costs, do I continue to add more machines as current ones reach end of life, or as new requirements come along?

Do I listen to the (convincing) pitch from my co-location facility, which happily sells me a ‘private cloud’ that may fail to deliver some of the economies of scale so central to the main Cloud proposition?

Do I listen to the horror stories, stick my head in the sand, and simply keep ordering servers until every single one of my competitors undercuts my costs and I go out of business?

These, and more, are certainly possible. But let’s return to that UK project I mentioned right at the start.

Flexible Services for the Support of Research (FleSSR) is

“a new cloud pilot project looking at utilising hybrid private-public IaaS cloud infrastructure to provide computational and data services to the academic research community. The project is a collaboration between the Oxford e-Research Center, IT Service @ University or Reading, e-Science Centre @ STFC, Eduserv, EoverI, Eucalyptus INC and Canonical Ltd.”

The ten month project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), an organisation that supports the innovative use of IT across UK universities.

Now, to a degree, the project’s mindset must be influenced by its partners. IT staff at Reading and STFC are incumbents with turf to protect (or new vistas to discover, map, and claim). Eduserv has a new data centre that they’d like to fill with willing clients. It would be easy to be cynical, but knowing some of the people involved, I see no real reason to be. It is perfectly reasonable to suggest that a ‘community’ the size of UK Higher Education would realise value in replicating less (not nothing) at every university campus across the country, and bringing much of that together in some sort of Cloud. That Cloud might use public infrastructure, or it might be served up from an organisation such as Eduserv, which is known to the community, aware of the community’s requirements, quirks and foibles, and (importantly) not-for profit (and therefore cheaper?).

Personally, I’d always rather presumed that an organisation like Eduserv (or JISC itself) would act on behalf of the community to procure a competitive price on access to the resources of Amazon, Rackspace, or one of the others. I’m not convinced that most UK research computation needs any sort of special treatment that couldn’t be met from Amazon’s Dublin data centre… unless the community itself can somehow beat – and continue to beat – Amazon on price. Somewhat surprisingly, that’s exactly what some calculations in two posts by Eduserv’s Andy Powell suggest could happen. By including network costs and other charges over and above the basic storage cost, Andy finds Amazon, Rackspace and Dropbox to be more expensive than anticipated, and posits that Eduserv (connected to every UK university free of charge via JISC’s high speed JANET service, and constrained in the ways it can generate profit from services sold to universities by its charitable status) might actually work out cheaper.

There’s a lot of work to do in terms of fleshing out the assumptions behind some of Andy’s figures, but the whole industry certainly benefits when people conduct exercises like these out in the open, for all to see. If Andy has made mistakes, the vendors should be quick to jump in and correct them. If his assumptions miss the mark, public debate can redress the balance.

The Cloud is not all about price. But more transparency around the true cost of computing in the Cloud – and in your data centre – means that we can all make more informed decisions.

Thanks for sharing, Andy – and hopefully readers will be willing and able to look over your calculations and share their own views.

Note: this post was conceived and written in the United Kingdom. By reading this post you agree to comply with UK usage, and will henceforth pronounce the word ‘niche’ from the title as ‘neesh,’ not ‘nitch.’ Or maybe not.

Related articles

• Rackspace launches managed cloud services (zdnet.com)
• Are hybrid clouds the path to cloud-computing nirvana? (venturebeat.com)
• We’ll Take Care of Your Cloud, While You Manage Your Business (rackspacecloud.com)
• Trust Is Key For Cloud Success And What Can We Do About It? (cloudave.com)

The OpenStack activity was unveiled by Rackspace, NASA, and their partners back in July, and is on track to deliver functional initial releases in the next few weeks. We discuss the relationship between OpenStack’s deliverables and earlier developments from Rackspace and NASA’s Nebula project, and begin to explore the implications of an Open Source Cloud Computing stack for the wider industry.

This podcast was recorded on Friday 10 September, 2010.

During our conversation we referred to the following resources;

• Amazon
• Amazon EC2
• Amazon S3
• Apache license
• Citrix
• Cloud.com
• Dell
• GoGrid
• HP (and my podcast with Russ Daniels)
• IBM (and my podcasts with Kristof Kloeckner and Ric Telford)
• KVM
• Linux
• Microsoft (and my podcast with Amitabh Srivastava)
• mySQL
• NASA
• NASA Nebula (and my article for GigaOM Pro)
• OpenStack
• OpenStack code launchpad
• OpenStack design conference, November 2010
• Oracle
• Rackspace (and my podcast with Lew Moorman)
• Rackspace CloudFiles
• VirtualBox
• Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, discussing ‘false Clouds’ at GigaOM’s Structure conference
• XenServer

Related articles by Zemanta

• OpenStack sets some Texas-sized deadlines (zdnet.com)
• OpenStack: Rackspace and NASA Nebula Join Forces for Open Cloud Ecosystem (readwriteweb.com)
• NASA gives OpenStack instant credibility (zdnet.com)
• Impact of OpenStack Project Goes Beyond the Cloud Industry Leaders (readwriteweb.com)
• Space IT, the final frontier (radar.oreilly.com)
• What’s next for OpenStack’s cloud efforts (news.cnet.com)
• Rackspace Announces Open Source Cloud Platform (informationweek.com)

When I was a child, I wanted to be a spaceman. No great surprise there, perhaps, and also no great surprise that I — like so many others — never got to achieve that dream.

Still, when the opportunity presented itself to write a space-y piece as my latest contribution over on GigaOM Pro, I jumped at it.

It was fascinating to hear about the very different efforts at the European Space Agency and NASA to harness Cloud Computing… and it brought back some of that childhood excitement in the process.

Thanks to William O’Mullane at ESA and Chris Kemp at NASA Ames for their time and insight.

And if a slot opens up on the next non-robot mission, you know where to reach me…

Related articles by Zemanta

• NASA’s Nebula: The Cloud in a Container (datacenterknowledge.com)
• To Space and Beyond: The Rise of Research-driven Cloud Computing (gigaom.com)
• Cassini Shows Saturnian Roller Derby, Strange Weather (spacefellowship.com)
• Ames expects Obama budget will mean growth (insidehpc.com)

Twitter is aflutter once again this morning, this time over a Wall Street Journal suggestion that ‘IBM in talks to buy Sun.’ I am not able to comment on the veracity of the rumour itself, but it’s clear that Sun needs to do something in order to strengthen its position in a competitive market. Selling to IBM is certainly one route, but an easier one might be the provision of a more complete Sun-badged proposition.

Elsewhere on WSJ.com this morning, in news that seems extremely unlikely to be unconnected, Don Clark reports on Sun’s

“plans to offer its own cloud-style services. Sun also plans to offer software, as well as hardware, to other companies that want to build clouds.”

Alongside competitive enterprise server hardware and Sun’s widely used stable of open source software (Solaris, Java, MySQL, OpenOffice, etc), this latest announcement of ‘Sun Cloud Storage’ (equivalent to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, S3) and ‘Sun Cloud Compute’ (equivalent to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2) should make Sun a serious player in the Cloud Computing space in a way that their abortive network.com never really did.

So why is anyone discussing either a desire on Sun’s part to sell, or a desire on IBM’s part to consider buying?

I’ve greatly enjoyed the insights of Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, especially as enunciated most recently on his blog in two videos discussing community adoption of Sun’s open source software and the commercial models Sun deploys to monetise that community. Despite Jonathan’s arguments, though, it seems to me that Sun lacks a fundamental piece of the whole; an effective and highly visible professional services arm. IBM has this. HP, with the purchase of EDS, has this. Accenture and gang are this, but nothing makes them choose to use or recommend Sun over its competitors today.

As Jonathan discusses in the first of the videos I pointed to (YouTube version embedded below, in two parts), Sun has been successful in encouraging use and innovation around a suite of open source operating systems, tools and applications.

Indeed, it was little more than a year ago that the company announced plans to spend some $800 million in acquiring European open source web database company MySQL. The problem is that these solutions are all freely downloadable from the Web, and the inevitable professional services and consultancy work associated with enterprise delivery — which could generate so much revenue — goes to far more companies than just Sun.

Alongside the software, Sun has a competitive range of hardware offerings in the enterprise space, and sells these in competition with IBM, HP, Dell and the rest.

By omitting a compelling and enveloping professional services proposition, Sun damages its own ability to capitalise upon its software and hardware efforts. Potential customers download Sun software, and then run it on anything; Sun gets a very small slice of the hardware sales. Sun isn’t doing badly at selling hardware, but maybe a more rounded services proposition would enable them to do better, despite Jonathan’s points in the commercial innovation video.

With more emphasis on offering a comprehensive package of solutions — whilst not removing choice and the vibrant open source community of which Jonathan speaks — might Sun not be a more obvious choice for customers in need of services and support?

An acquisition might, as Larry Dignan writes, make sense. But there’s plenty of life left in a standalone Sun, too… if it can monetise more of those downloading free software or steer more of those who ‘just need a server’ towards one with a Sun badge on the front. Professional Services are the road to both.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Sun’s missing mojo: MIA until when? (news.cnet.com)
• IBM, Amazon foreshadow bevy of connecting clouds (news.cnet.com)
• Cisco’s Data Center Moves: Who Wins, Who Loses? (gigaom.com)
• Cisco’s Data Center Play Reinvents The Server (gigaom.com)
• Sun takes another swing at cloud computing (infoworld.com)
• Sun CEO: Open source = free advertising (news.cnet.com)
• Sun Microsystem Business Revenues (Latest Discovery) (it-sideways.com)
• Schwartz: Not worried about Sun’s future (infoworld.com)

In conversation with RightScale CEO Michael Crandell yesterday it would appear that he, at least, sees little need to join this scramble upward.

Show notes for this podcast are available on Talis‘ Nodalities blog.

For those with absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, it’s worth taking a moment to step back and describe this Cloud Computing stack. At its simplest (and this is quite complex and descriptive enough for almost every real-world conversation, thank you very much), the stack can simply be characterised as Applications (or Software), which sit atop Platforms, which sit atop Infrastructure. I have lifted four slides from a recent presentation, to graphically illustrate the stack and to show some of the players found at each layer.

Each layer of the stack is extremely dependent upon the one below, and there is a tendency for the lower levels to be perceived as more of a commodity or utility. As such, pricing tends to be highly competitive and margins on individual transactions are (often) vanishingly small, requiring successful players to operate at scale in order to effectively generate revenue.

Assuming these presumptions to be true, it’s easy to see why those operating at and near the Infrastructure layer might wish to progress upward to a space where there is less direct competition and far more opportunity to charge premium prices.

As Michael and I discussed in our podcast ‘basic’ Infrastructure providers such as Amazon, GoGrid, Rackspace and others are increasingly seeking to enrich their own offerings, adding dashboard and management functionality that was previously the preserve of value-adding third parties such as Michael’s company.

Faced with pricing pressure from direct competitors and potential feature creep from below, it’s certainly easy to believe the truism with which this post began.

Have a listen, though, and hear a rather different view of the space from Michael… who seems perfectly happy where he is in the stack.

Related articles by Zemanta

• RightScale Gets $13M To Manage the Cloud (gigaom.com)
• Cloud management startup RightScale raises another $13M (venturebeat.com)
• Executive Briefing on Cloud Computing (aws.typepad.com)
• Cloud computing: Don’t get caught without an exit strategy (infoworld.com)
• Without APIs, there is no cloud computing (news.cnet.com)
• What is Cloud Computing … (gardeviance.org)
• The Cloud is the Next Step in Enterprise Computing (byronmiller.typepad.com)
• Amazon Crushes Ecosystem – Launches AWS Management Console (elasticvapor.com)

The event was organised by London consultancy firm BroadGroup, and ably Chaired by Tim Jackson. BroadGroup were also pitching their (possibly valuable) new report on ‘the rise and meaning of Cloud Computing,’ but even with my £100 attendee’s discount the £995/ £1,295 price tag is a little too steep for me to buy and review a copy here.

Travel delays meant that I missed the pre-lunch sessions on the first day; ‘Making Money from Cloud Computing’ and ‘Corporate IT & Cloud Computing.’ Luckily (for me, at least), opening keynoter JP Rangaswami was also delayed, and I did manage to hear him later in the day. More on that later, but for the sake of completeness here are the abstracts for the sessions I didn’t manage to record myself;

Making Money from Cloud Computing

“The Cloud represents a wide range of service models from SaaS and storage and server capacity to consumer services. Measuring the costs associated with Cloud computing brings with it a range of variables beyond standard data centre colo space and power. The pattern of demand and usage behaviour and the opportunity cost of and required speed to scale for example, represent key factors to consider. In achieving ROI therefore, how quickly will Cloud be adopted? Which market segments will represent critical targets for Cloud services? Is the economic downturn a catalyst for Cloud? Who will be the key enablers? Where will value and competitive advantage be found? Will Cloud disrupt the licensed software model? What are the business models for Cloud, how do they differ and how will they be monetized?”

Corporate IT & Cloud Computing

“With increasing globalization and mobility, as well as escalating competitive forces and productivity requirements, corporations of all sizes have started to rethink how they should operate. This process is accelerating as the current downturn continues to impact revenues. How quickly will Cloud be adopted in the Enterprise? How difficult will it be for enterprises to switch from one Cloud provider to another? Is lock-in more likely? Which Cloud solutions will prove the best fit for large enterprises and how quickly will Cloud technologies accelerate efficiencies that deliver bottom line results at a time of economic downturn? Or, is Cloud Computing just another tool in the IT box?”

Finance, Investors & Cloud Computing

After lunch, Alexis Richardson of Cohesive FT, Greg Marsh of Index Ventures and Duncan Johnston-Watt of Cloudsoft shared their views on key opportunities for investors in the Cloud.

Alexis began by discussing discussing the economic disruption posed by adoption of Cloud Computing, but warned that Gartner‘s Trough of Disillusionment is not far ahead of us with so many organisations today ‘massively over-promising on the Cloud.’ He suggested that adoption of Cloud Computing is ‘mostly a US phenomenon’ just now, with Europe allegedly ’18 months behind.’

“Independence from the computer is a bigger market opportunity than the adoption of the PC in the first place.”

Clouds are seeing ‘plenty of adoption’ from consumers and small business lured by the flexibility, scalability and on-demand pricing. Despite 58% of CIOs at larger organisations feeling that Cloud Computing will ’cause a radical shift,’ enterprise adoption tends to be more cautious.

Alexis characterised the two extremes, suggesting that consumers and small businesses are welcoming the Cloud, saying

“Yes we can!”

Large enterprises, on the other hand, remain more cautious, tending to

“Just say ‘No!’”

Next up was Greg Marsh, who reminded the audience that Index Ventures is an early stage venture firm, established in 1996, and currently with $2bn under management. Most of their portfolio is in Europe, and includes well-known names such as Love Film, Skype, Last.fm and MySQL. In the Cloud space, RightScale is one of their investments.

Greg suggested that ‘Cloud’ is a broad term that includes many innovations from ‘Grid done right’ to Software as a Service, but stressed that investors are looking for a number of things before giving their money to a new prospect;

• smart teams
• pursuit of opportunities that are massively scalable
• low capital intensity
• market savvy
• A Big Idea

In discussion a member of the audience posed an interesting question, asking whether there were ‘problems of scale’ to counter the ‘economies of scale’ often cited for Cloud-based infrastructure and services. Many of Google’s services, for example, might simply remain in beta because it’s impossible to define and deliver the sorts of reliability and up-time that we would expect from a commercial service. Whilst these services are generally extremely reliable across the board, the reliance upon large numbers of machines in numerous data centres running innumerable processes makes it extremely likely that someone is going to receive a bad service… and there’s very little that Google et al can do about it.

Image via Wikipedia

JP Rangaswami

BT Design’s MD for Innovation & Strategy, JP Rangaswami, then delivered his delayed keynote and began by reminding the audience of Gartner’s definition of Cloud Computing. Broadly, he paraphrased, Gartner stress delivery of service,  scalable elasticity,  multi-tenancy and  a basis in open standards. For those unable to access Gartner’s reports, one of the authors recently did some public paraphrasing of his own.

All of these, Rangaswami argued, were available and understood a decade or more ago.

A theme running through Rangaswami’s presentation – and the final panel of the day – was the suggestion that many potential beneficiaries of Cloud Computing are in danger of being left behind;

“while we pretend the Cloud isn’t happening, while we bring up excuses of security, latency, governance… there are the new Googles and the new Amazons building out… because they don’t care.”

Whilst agreeing that the guarantees and assurances offered by Service Level Agreements, due diligence and contracts can be important,

“let’s not waste time worrying about [the lack of an SLA]. What’s really exciting is today’s equivalent of Google or Amazon or eBay… looking at what’s available today and extending it”

He pointed to the example of Animoto, able to scale rapidly thanks to their use of Cloud infrastructure;

“They weren’t agonising over Governance… they just did it.  25,000 users to 250,000 users. 50 instances to 3,000+ instances in three days.”

Rangaswami suggested that three characteristics make Cloud Computing different to the individually similar technologies preceding it;

• it’s about mobile;
• it’s about data (from ‘data centre’ to ‘data centric’);
• it’s about different values.

“The opportunities look different today. The next Google will be invented by a guy with a credit card. No Venture Capital. No capital needed.

The ‘boring’ issues don’t go away… but they can be dealt with later…”

Technologies & Cloud Computing

The final session of the day explored Technologies and Cloud Computing, where JP and I joined Rightscale CEO Mike Crandell and Amazon Web Services Evangelist Simone Brunozzi on the stage. I was too busy participating to take notes, but felt like it went well.

Day Two: Infrastructure & Cloud Computing

Missing the first session on ‘Consumers & Cloud Computing’ for a conference call, my Day Two began with a panel comprising Xcalibre CEO Tony Lucas, Quest Software‘s European CTO Joe Baguley, Endeavors Technologies‘ CTO Arthur Hitomi, Telkom SA‘s David Lupafya and Alog Data Centres Do Brasil‘s President Sidney Breyer.

Tony talked about the lack of spare capacity to power new data centres in and around London, and pointed to the benefits of off-shoring new data centres to Iceland where power and cooling are plentiful, investment money is welcome, and network links are excellent.

“Is UK investment in the network actually to ensure we can reach our own content, off-shored to places where it can be stored and managed more efficiently?”

David spoke knowledgeably about the rather different situation in southern Africa, illustrating challenges facing the area whilst also demonstrating situations in which infrastructure and practice is actually moving beyond the ‘more developed’ countries of the world.

Privacy, Regulation, Security and Cloud Computing

In a session that delved into the morass of complex legal issues surrounding the movement and storage of data, we learned that ‘choice of law’ clauses in contracts may not be worth the paper upon which they are printed, that European Data Protection laws may be difficult to enforce upon sub-contractors of sub-contractors of sub-contractors in a contract, and of the Affero Clause’s importance in protecting the rights of Cloud developers. Welcome relief from the language of law came in the form of HP Labs‘ Miranda Mowbray, who managed to repeatedly and relevantly link her discussion of legal issues to The Hound of the Baskervilles; complete with readings and foggy slides.

‘Icy Tube Sign‘ image © Sheila Thomson, 2009.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Snow Business Means No Business in London (time.com)
• London, buried in snow (gadling.com)
• Risks and issues in Cloud Computing (ericbrown.com)
• London Snow & Twittering News (onemanandhisblog.com)
• RightScale Gets $13M To Manage the Cloud (gigaom.com)
• Rackspace Survey And Its Implications (cloudave.com)
• Cloud Computing: The Last Definition You’ll Ever Need (devcentral.f5.com)
• Cloud Computing and the Enterprise (ericbrown.com)
• A year in the clouds (infoworld.com)
• Do you think the current financial crisis will push CEO/CFO/CIO to reduce the IT costs by adopting Cloud Computing services? (elasticvapor.com)
• What can you expect from a cloud? (blogs.sun.com)
• The Evils of Cloud Computing (stealthmode.com)