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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

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• Proposed spec aims to nix cloud lock-in (gigaom.com)
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In many ways, the core concept of the data marketplace is nothing new. Companies like Bloomberg, Nielsen and Experian have built (extremely) profitable businesses by aggregating data, quality checking it, and selling it on. Often their customers could have gone directly to the source(s) and paid far less, but they don’t. The convenience and quality assurance of dealing with a single — reputable — source is perceived to have value. A brand like Bloomberg’s is associated with trustworthiness and authority, and the brand of the marketplace is far more prominent than the data sets upon which it is built.

Similar sites have also served the needs of those seeking data for free, with IBM’s ManyEyes project, Freebase (acquired by Google), Hans Rosling’s Gapminder or The Guardian‘s Data Store amongst those typically mentioned. Current government enthusiasm for ‘transparency’ has fed all of these sites with data, and led to creation of large government-specific data repositories such as data.gov.uk.

The commercial services like Bloomberg have tended to focus upon specific domains (finance, in Bloomberg’s case) or types of data. They have also tended to be eye-wateringly expensive; aimed squarely at the small market segment for whom the data are mission-critical and the fees are affordable. The free services like Gapminder also tend to focus (global development statistics in this case). Other, perhaps, than experiments like ManyEyes, both the free and the commercial sites tended to aim for a degree of comprehensiveness and authority. They wanted to become the place to turn for their type of data.

But for the new generation of data markets, the picture becomes far less clear. They tend to be catholic in their data acquisition policies, they typically don’t even attempt comprehensiveness, they mix free (almost all of them hold identical large swathes of government data from the US, the UK, and elsewhere) with commercial data, and they continue to feel their way toward business models that might prove sustainable for the long haul. Perhaps more seriously, they appear almost schizophrenic with respect to brand projection, attempting to push both their own brand and those of the data sets they host in ways that can confuse far more often than they enlighten.

In attempting to differentiate themselves, today’s data markets are seeking to add features and functionality in order to be seen as far more than simply places to buy third-party data. They want to become recognised for quality assurance, for data enrichment, or for tools and capabilities that make working with the data easier or more powerful. They want to become sticky, and they want to be seen as different from their competitors. The trick, though, is to explain those features and those differences in ways that make sense to potential customers. Those customers will ultimately pay for functionality and utility, not for gimmicks or under-the-hood technological distinctions that have no real impact upon getting on with the job in hand. Are today’s data markets describing their features in ways that help prospective customers to understand why they should be chosen over the alternatives? Not really. At least, not yet.

Also, as RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady touched upon amongst a set of related issues, we’ve really not begun to see much evidence of price competition. There are too few suppliers, each with their fiercely loyal bands of tame users (‘customers’), and too few people prepared to shop around for the best deal.

The new data markets are still young. Understandably, they are still feeling their way in order to understand what the market wants, how much it is prepared to pay for what it wants, how large the market might be, and what their individual niche within that broader market might look like. Earlier models, based upon almost monopolistic domination of specific verticals and polarised pricing, offer some lessons but are ultimately unsatisfactory blueprints for this more competitive, open, and complex environment. Beyond specific domains like finance (which may be ripe for disruption), the data markets must struggle to convince prospective customers that they have something of value to offer. Those customers may already have their own processes for obtaining data. They may generate the data themselves, or expect — as so many do — to be able to access what they need for free. They are perhaps suspicious of data produced by third parties who are, in other contexts, their competitors, and they are almost certainly unwilling to allow ‘the competition’ to benefit from their own data. They invariably do not understand the costs associated with gathering and quality-assuring data, or the challenge of preparing different data sets in order that they may meaningfully be combined. And into this, the fledgling data markets must insert themselves, market themselves, and sell themselves. They must change behaviours, they must challenge presumptions, they must alter working practices, and they must persuade their new customers that all of this pain is worth paying for. A tall order, indeed, but necessary if any of them are to realise their potential.

The European Commission, at least, begins to comprehend the scale of the challenge. A set of projects are currently being finalised, and this year will see European SMEs given the funding to boot-strap a number of new data sources. With Commission funding, it is hoped, the chosen projects will be able to explore models by which data can be created, curated, shared and re-used in a manner that is cost-effective and ultimately sustainable. The funding should enable these projects to reach viable scale, and give participants the freedom to explore alternative commercial models. The projects will be announced shortly, but only time will tell if the funding and the incentives are sufficient to break through the barriers that prevented any of these markets from forming by themselves.

But outside the rather artificial bubble created by European public funding, there is a lot of work to do. Investors are intrigued by — but still wary of — the opportunity. Infochimps is spending its way through over $1.5 million of investment, Factual has almost $30 million, and companies like Talis and Microsoft are making not-insignificant investments in their own efforts. We’re all still experimenting, but with the real market for these services currently falling far short of the money at stake, it mustn’t be long before investors start asking harder questions. Back in 2010, Pete Soderling and Pete Forde described data as a $100 billion market. The data markets may be after a significant chunk of that but, today, they’re not even close.

The ways that data markets are attempting to differentiate themselves, and the work being done to understand the market opportunity here, will have to wait for subsequent posts.

Disclosures: I am a former employee of and current shareholder in Kasabi’s parent company, Talis. The European Commission is, from time to time, a client.

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As part of a restructuring of the organisation’s US-based data centres, the acronym-laden NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) today announced that its ACT (Allied Command Transformation) will be deploying IBM‘s PCS (Private Cloud Solution*) inside its HQ SACT (Headquarters, Supreme Allied Commander Transformation) in Norfolk, VA.

According to IBM’s E.J. Herold, the company is delivering the software component of their ‘Cloud in a Box’ solution. Normally sold alongside racks full of IBM blades, the NATO installation will see IBM’s software running on the data centre’s existing (mixed) hardware. A second extant data centre – in San Diego, CA – will also be shut down as part of the transformation.

Comprising 28 members from Albania to the United States, NATO constantly grapples with issues of interoperability. 28 members, plus NATO itself, means (at least!) 29 different IT infrastructures, (at least) 29 different communications protocols, and (at least) 29 different views on the standards and specifications to underpin any one IT deployment. In operational environments, whether military or peace keeping, limitations in interoperability of IT inevitably lead to expense, confusion, delay… and perhaps loss of life. Following NATO’s summit in Lisbon last month, the organisation reaffirmed the importance of greater cooperation between partners.

Today’s announcement aligns well with this new ‘Strategic Concept,’ delivering a cost-effective test and development environment to the ACT. According to IBM’s press release,

“The on-premise cloud will be used to test and develop network solutions for command, control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance projects. The goal is to demonstrate how recent developments in cloud computing can reduce ramp-up time for enhanced technology capabilities, while improving important operational functions, such as increasing situational awareness and faster decision-making.”

In this initial test/dev deployment, it is anticipated that IBM’s solution will enable NATO to more rapidly explore a range of scenarios for collaboration and data exchange across the Alliance. Broader roll-out of the Cloud solution itself may follow in due course, initially to other NATO sites, but ultimately into the military infrastructure of NATO’s members. IBM’s Herold suggests that, with this project, NATO ACT is taking a leadership role in developing techniques and solutions that will make NATO itself more effective… and eventually trickle down into the internal practices of NATO member states.

Here, as in so many other markets, the relative safety of test&dev is an obvious place to begin exploring the potential – and pitfalls – of a Cloud solution. As more data centres – and more partners – become involved in future deployments, the ugly spectre of security will of course raise its head. But if NATO and its members can (mostly) keep their existing infrastructure secure, a private cloud should be no more risky…

Today’s announcement is relatively modest, and many purists would argue that it’s not even a Cloud. But it’s a tentative first step for a security-conscious organisation made up of (at least) 28 frequently paranoid military hierarchies, and will become far more interesting – and challenging – as it expands beyond the (relatively) safe confines of a single data centre inside a US Naval Base. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

* ok, I made that one up.

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In my latest podcast I talk with Ric Telford, Vice President for Cloud Services at IBM.

I spoke with Kristof Kloeckner – the company’s CTO and VP Cloud Computing Platforms – last year, and in my conversation with Ric we get updates on IBM’s journey into the Cloud. He touches on some of the work involved in bringing traditional enterprise customers along for the ride.

Perhaps orthogonal to the industry’s current angst around public, private and hybrid Clouds, Telford sees a valid and valuable role for ‘industry clouds,’ optimised to handle the particular workloads of a given vertical. The first of these rolled out today to the collaborative healthcare market, and we discuss some of the potential of this approach. If it can work in the highly regulated health sector, can the same ideas be deployed more easily – and cheaply – to other verticals?

This podcast was recorded on Thursday 5 August, 2010.

During our conversation, we referred to the following resources;

• Amazon Web Services
• Cast Iron
• Cognos
• IBM Cloud Computing
• IBM Security Framework
• Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
• Lotus Live
• Microsoft Windows Azure (and my podcast with Amitabh Srivastava)
• Open Cloud Manifesto (and my podcast with Reuven Cohen)
• Open Stack
• Open Virtualization Format (OVF)
• Rackspace (and my podcast with Lew Moorman)
• Salesforce.com (and my podcast with Adam Gross)
• Sharp Community Medical Group
• Smarter Planet
• Thomas J. Watson

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“All too often, insider analyst research and commentary is costly, inaccessible or ineffective to the entrepreneurs, investors and innovators who need timely insights most. We’re changing this by making high-quality expert reports, data and commentary easy to access and highly interactive for our community in key emerging technology areas.”

I was therefore delighted when VP of Research Michael Wolf got in touch before Christmas to ask if I’d be interested in providing them with content.

My first piece, which is published today, explores some of the issues faced by Cloud service providers and users in negotiating the attitudes and laws of the different jurisdictions through which their data may pass. I would welcome any comments on the piece, and must thank Microsoft‘s Matt Deacon, Sun Microsystems‘ Michelle Dennedy, IBM‘s Harriet Pearson, Rackspace‘s Simon Abrahams, Computacenter‘s Matthew Yeager and F5 Networks‘ Lori MacVittie for taking the time to talk with me as I prepared it. Thanks, also, to Celeste LeCompte at GigaOM for editing and for Americaniszing my spellingz… Any misunderstandings, misrepresentations, typos etc, are of course my own.

I look forward to my next GigaOM assignment!

For those on this side of the Atlantic with a particular interest in the topic, London’s Powered By Cloud event (where I participated in a panel last year) is back for a second edition on 8 and 9 February. Of particular interest in this context is an addition to this year’s event; 10 February’s dedicated to a Cloud Law Summit.

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It might seem that the mega-bucks reports from the likes of Gartner, Forrester et al are the preserve of CxOs with vast desks upon which they can array the multitudinous documents to which their employers’ subscription entitles them. The truth, though, is that these documents — which notionally sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars apiece — can often be downloaded in exchange for some contact details. The source of this apparent largesse is not the analysts’ own website, but rather the sites of companies looked upon with particular favour within a given report. The back-room exchanges of kudos, cash, or mutual back-slapping that sees these assets made freely available are well understood, and legitimate.

And so it was with a recent report from Forrester, made freely available to all via the web site of 3Tera; the co-founder of which I spoke with recently in one of my podcasts.

The report is ‘Deliver Cloud Benefits Inside Your Walls,’ dated 13 April 2009, and produced by Forrester’s James Staten with input from Simon Yates, John Rymer, Frank Gillett and Lauren Nelson. Billed as “the first document in the ‘Private Cloud’ series,” it would appear that Forrester, at least, has no hang-ups about the notion of a Private Cloud. Whilst some purists become incredibly agitated about this ‘dilution’ of their dream, realists, pragmatists and (it would appear) analysts are simply getting on with it.

According to the report’s Executive Summary,

“While the excitement about cloud computing centers on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and other public infrastructure-as-a-service products, many enterprise infrastructure and operations professionals are taking this concept in-house and building their own internal clouds. These pools of virtual machines can be built upon either virtual server or high-performance computing (HPC) grid foundations and can be operated according to the specific security and process requirements of the business. But to deliver the fundamentally better economic value of cloud architectures within your walls, these clouds require a dynamic platform (or automated workload management) and developer self-service interfaces. There’s a growing list of vendors eager to help you deploy an internal cloud, but be sure you understand that these solutions are more building blocks than complete solutions and must be customized to your specific needs.”

It would be impossible to cover the space in much detail in a report comprising just nine pages of substantive content, but Staten and his co-authors do a reasonable job of outlining some high level benefits of internal deployment whilst also flagging some of the issues in need of addressing. Prominent amongst these is the suggestion that ‘bypassing IT Ops’ to hand developers their own internal Cloud is not necessarily something to be done lightly;

“Whether you buy the hype or not, enterprise application developers are finding the self-service, pay-as-you-go, instant deployment values of cloud computing platforms appealing. Developers can go to a Web page, sign up with a credit card, and instantly instantiate any number of virtual machines and applications without any IT ops involvement. Interviews conducted by Forrester show that many
enterprise developers are doing just that.

But IT ops processes and procedures — and enterprise architecture rules for that matter — exist to ensure that the overarching needs and policies of the business are fulfilled and followed. Although making time in the deployment process to accommodate these demands may hinder time-to-market, often there are very good reasons to do so”

This is true, but overlooks the reality that those processes and procedures arose to manage a very different environment. There is a middle ground to steer here, and it is one that should make a great deal of sense. Virtualisation, elasticity and more create significant opportunities for the cost-effective provision of Enterprise IT. Rather than simply accepting the status quo of those established processes and procedures, or routing around them with the departmental credit card and some cheap Dells or EC2 instances, there is a real opportunity for IT and business teams to engage in fresh dialogue; to understand the match between changing expectations, changing requirements, and changing possibilities.

A throwaway comment also points, tellingly, to the real need for organisational change if we are to optimise the benefits of these new opportunities;

“We can stand up a LAMP stack or Windows VM within 24 hours now — one hour to provision the VM and 23 hours to move the money.”

Elsewhere in the document, the Forrester team suggests that,

“With today’s virtual infrastructure solutions and a growing list of internal cloud platform technologies, it’s fairly easy for an enterprise to start up a cloud-like environment within its own domain.”

The document goes on to suggest that, in Q3 of 2008, around 4% of surveyed enterprises in Europe and North America had done so, with a significant number implementing or seeking budget. More than half of those surveyed, though, were either ‘Not Aware’ or ‘Not Interested’ in an Internal Cloud. For ‘small businesses’ of fewer than 100 employees that figure rose to a massive 80%. It would be interesting to see the same figures for ‘Public Cloud’ utilisation… although there is likely to be significantly more under-reporting of public Cloud use as so much of it will be by individuals and teams who are below the corporate radar.

With one of the significant cost reductions in the public Cloud being directly related to more efficient utilisation of virtual and physical machines, the corresponding saving within the enterprise — whilst still significant — is likely to be smaller, and there may still be a need for a hybrid arrangement to permit ‘cloud bursting’ at times of particularly high load.

The document draws out three ‘internal Cloud solutions’ — 3Tera, Elastra and Zimory — all of which are worth a look, and then goes on to very briefly touch on three alternative approaches. Here, more than elsewhere in the document, Forrester seem not to go into enough detail. They touch upon a DIY approach based upon EUCALYPTUS (now available in commercial form, of course, although the authors don’t mention this), contracting with a systems integrator such as IBM to secure a bespoke solution, and ‘waiting for the major virtualisation vendors to show up.’

There’s an awful lot of activity already underway from these companies, with whom enterprises probably already have a relationship, and it seems unhelpful to pass over them so quickly. What about Windows Azure, for example, which Microsoft is increasingly suggesting should be available for local utilisation?

So, on the whole this document is a useful overview. As might be expected in something of this length, it ends up raising more questions than it answers (which drives Forrester customers back to their Analysts, of course), and there are one or two areas in which it leaves odd gaps. Maybe the next document in the series will begin to fill some of those gaps?

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With an enterprise-friendly combination of hardware, software and professional services, IBM should be well placed to work with wary CxOs as they try to understand the extent to which Cloud Computing makes sense within their own business. Announcements earlier this year, as I said at the time, seemed geared toward building and sign-posting an easy on-ramp to the Cloud for those already comfortable with IBM and its products, but the indications were that IBM had bigger plans.

I spoke with Kristof Kloeckner recently, to learn more about the company’s intentions and its interest in encouraging the development of standards.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis, and show notes are available on their Nodalities blog.

Kristof is CTO and VP Cloud Computing Platforms for IBM, and has much to say about the company’s current and future direction.

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Much has changed since then and we now know, for example, that Oracle has supplanted IBM as suitor for the Santa Clara company.

Amidst the distractions of a market obsessed with the next twist in the ongoing acquisition saga, Sun appears as committed as ever to delivering on their vision for Cloud Computing, and I recently spoke with Juan Carlos Soto to learn more about the company’s plans. Juan Carlos is currently Vice President for Cloud Computing Marketing at Sun Microsystems, and has held a number of technical and business positions in more than ten years with Sun.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis, and show notes are available on their Nodalities blog.

Initially pitched straight at the utility computing needs of Web startups, Sun has far broader enterprise ambitions for a Cloud Computing offer that plays as well with Fortune 500′s CIOs as with dorm-room startups. An initial RESTful API is already available, and Soto reports that the company remains on track to roll out public services in the next few months.

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Everyone who wants to do so should have had their chance to read the Open Cloud Manifesto by now, and to see the list of companies putting their names to it. As expected, Microsoft, Google and Amazon are not there.

Reuven Cohen of Enomaly is one of those involved in bringing the Manifesto to fruition, and I spoke to him on Thursday evening last week to hear more.

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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.

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