Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Spring clouds are in the air

It's spring here in the Bluegrass region, and I'm excited to see so much activity in the cloud space.  I'm pretty much a risk averse individual, so jumping into a dedicated cloud consulting team at HP back in 2010 was relatively risky.  Perhaps you have heard about our leadership and strategic struggles - it was not at all clear that HP even had a cloud strategy back then.  I am happy to report that Meg Whitman's leadership has thus far been the best I've seen at HP since I was acquired as part of the EDS purchase.  More importantly, she's making some big bets on cloud.

A couple weeks ago HP's public cloud services went live.  They're still in beta, and this is not a plug for HP, but it's relevant to mention because it speaks to the continuing evolution of the cloud market.  For so long, it was Amazon only, and let's be honest, Amazon got into cloud computing as an afterthought.  "Well, we've got all these servers laying around here with extra capacity... why not rent that space?"  AWS has evolved into a compelling offering that is proving to be quite popular, but let's not forget its beginnings.  This week, SAP bought Ariba, and Oracle continues to backtrack on it's "cloud won't last" stance.

I love seeing a diverse mix of companies offering cloud services.  This is the free market at work.  The best models will attract more customers.  We've already got two competing open-source cloud architectures (CloudStack and OpenStack; note that Intel is betting on both). Perhaps most telling is that Enterprise IT leaders are reporting that around 1/3 of their budgets are now being spent on cloud.  Cloud is a new market, so it's also a level playing field (for now).  Small start-ups can offer XaaS just as easily as HP. These are all good things.

So what's next?  What will the rest of this year see in the cloud market?  My own two cents is that we'll start to see standardization in the way that cloud services are described, and that in turn will drive the creation of online marketplaces for cloud services.  I think this is the next logical step for cloud computing.  Amazon and Google already offer "app stores" for cloud SaaS, and I believe that model will expand to include XaaS offerings.  I see both a human interface version of these marketplaces, as well as a "UDDI" type standard for auto discovery.  Today, it's still very difficult to compare apples to apples when shopping for cloud services. Six months from now, I think that will no longer be true.