Lydia LeongI haven’t been posting much lately, due to being overwhelmingly busy with client inquiries, and having a few medical issues that have taken me out of the action somewhat. So, this is something of a catch-up, state-of-the-universe-from-my-perspective, inquiry-trends post.
With the economy picking up a bit, and businesses starting to return to growth initiatives rather than just cost optimization, and the approach of the budget season, the flow of client inquiry around cloud strategy has accelerated dramatically, to the point where cloud inquiries are becoming the overwhelming majority of my inquiries. Even my colocation and data center leasing inquiries are frequently taking on a cloud flavor, i.e., “How long more should we plan to have this data center, rather than just putting everything in the cloud?”
Organizations have really absorbed the hype — they genuinely believe that shortly, the cloud will solve all of their infrastructure issues. Sometimes, they’ve even made promises to executive management that this will be the case. Unfortunately, in the short term (i.e., for 2010 and 2011 planning), this isn’t going to be the case for your typical mid-size and enterprise business. There’s just too much legacy burden. Also, traditional software licensing schemes simply don’t work in this brave new world of elastic capacity.
The enthusiasm, though, is vast, which means that there are tremendous opportunities out there, and I think it’s both entirely safe and mainstream to run cloud infrastructure pilot projects right now, including large-scale, mission-critical, production infrastructure pilots for a particular business need (as opposed to deciding to move your whole data center into the cloud, which is still bleeding-edge adopter stuff). Indeed, I think there’s a significant untapped potential for tools that ease this transition. (Certainly there are any number of outsourcers and consultants who would love to charge you vast amounts of money to help you migrate.)
We see the colocation and data center leasing markets shift with the economy, and the trends and the players shift with them, especially as strong new regionals and high-density players emerge. The cloud influence is also significant, as people try to evaluate what their real needs for space will be going forward; this is particularly true for anyone looking at long-term leases, and wondering what the state of IT will be like going out ten years. Followers of this space should check out SwitchNAP for a good example of the kind of impact that a new player can make in a very short time (they opened in December).
August has been a consistently quiet month for CDN contract inquiries, and this year is no exception, but the whole of last three months has really been hopping. The industry is continuing to shift in interesting ways, not just because of the dynamics of the companies involved, but because of changing buyer needs. Also, there was a very interesting new launch in July, in the application delivery network space, a company called Asankya, definitely worth checking out if you follow this space.
All in all, there’s a lot of activity, and it’s becoming more future-focused as people get ready to prep their budgets. This is good news for everyone, I think. Even though the fundamental economic shifts have driven companies to be more value-driven, I think there’s a valuable emphasis being placed on the right solutions at the right price, that do the right thing for the business.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Dr. William L. Bain -- Founder and CEO, ScaleOut Software August 31, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Lydia, although the concept of cloud computing does carry with it inflated expectations today, it’s important to note that it’s a nascent technology which over time should become an integral and essential platform for hosting a wide variety of mission-critical business and scientific applications. If you look past the hype, cloud computing at its core can offer beneficial resources that are just too attractive to undervalue, such as offloading data center management and providing access to an elastic pool of computing. Moreover, the ability to virtualize these resources and consolidate them into a centrally managed data center offers enormous economies of scale and energy savings.
We do agree with you that there are several key challenges today that must be overcome if cloud computing is to deliver on these expectations. For example, applications which run in data centers on-premises must be able to seamlessly and securely migrate into the cloud without the need to redesign their data storage architectures. Today this is difficult to do because security, deployment, and storage mechanisms are unique to each cloud vendor’s infrastructure and distinct from mechanisms typically used on-premises. Once hosted in the cloud, applications also must be able to achieve their performance and reliability goals while running in a virtualized environment. Today’s virtualized infrastructure needs to evolve so that it can precisely allocate the virtualized resources (CPU, memory, storage, and networking) needed by applications need to meet performance goals.
With regard to storage, today there is no way to seamlessly migrate data into the cloud as an application scales from an on-premises deployment to an elastic set of virtual servers running within the cloud. Data must be packaged and staged in a cloud-based “blob” store or database server for retrieval within the cloud. For example, an active, e-commerce Web site cannot scale into the cloud and reach across to retrieve shopping carts that originally are hosted on-premises. ScaleOut Software is attacking this problem with distributed data grids than span multiple sites (e.g., on-premises and cloud) and transparently migrate application data where needed at all times.
Once these early obstacles are overcome, we believe that cloud computing will offer an enormous opportunity to realize its full potential for efficient, scalable computing. Its unique ability to provide an elastic pool of computing resources will enable applications designed for scalability to automatically harness additional resources as needed to handle very large workloads. These applications will be able to effortlessly process very large data sets in parallel, which we expect to have a revolutionary impact on data analysis. As they say, the best is yet to come, and I would expect that the inquiries you are receiving will only increase as the benefits associated with the cloud materialize.
2 Lydia Leong August 31, 2009 at 10:55 pm
Broadly, I agree. Gartner’s position is that cloud is the IT delivery model of the future, and although a hybrid model will (and should) prevail for many years, the future lies in what we term tera-architectures — true computing as a utility. It will be a long journey to get there, but the fundamental value proposition is sound.