With only a few word changes, the opening of the Communist Manifesto could be easily inserted into the Open Cloud Manifesto, announced March 30, 2009: 

“A spectre is haunting the cloud – the spectre of openness and standards. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre…”

This essentially describes the fear and the motivations behind the supporters of the Open Cloud Manifesto. Supported by a number of vendors who do not have a major cloud presence, including Cisco, EMC, IBM, Sun Microsystems and VMware. Not supported by vendors who already have a major cloud presence, notably Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com. Notice a trend?

The manifesto is simple and straightforward – so simple that the six “Principles of an Open Cloud” can be summarized as “Don’t use market position to lock-in customers, and drive cloud adoption through standards and collaboration directed toward customer needs, not provider needs.” In other words, stop building cloud services and stealing our customers until we get our act together to build cloud-based solutions for them.

Clearly the principles laid out in the manifesto are noble ones, and worthy of pursuit. But we’ve seen this play before. Vendor successfully creates a new market space, competitors cry foul and demand open standards and interoperability. “We want some of your customers!” The only difference with cloud computing is this is all taking place very, very quickly.

In the end – sorry Karl – capitalism will lead the evolution of cloud computing. It starts with innovators who pave the way. Let Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com build their proprietary cloud computing services. We need pioneers before we need standards.

As this market matures, customers will demand interoperability, portability, and federation with enterprise private cloud services. It is in the interests of newcomers to the cloud computing market to work together. The longer standards for cloud provider interoperability do not exist, the longer the entrenched cloud computing innovators will own the market.

So I have no problem with the Open Cloud Manifesto. It’s driven by capitalism – and in the end, the market will benefit. But don’t expect much soon, and don’t expect Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Salesforce.com to jump on board anytime soon. In fact, I’m sure they will be bashing the Manifesto and standards efforts for quite some time.

Cisco’s public blog recently announced an architectural approach they call “Unified Computing”. There’s been a lot of speculation about Cisco moving into the blade server business and so forth. I think Cisco just made clear that in their view the network may be at the center of IT, but “unifying” it with computing and storage is critical. Cisco is going to enter new markets. Maybe, better said, the lines between the technologies and the markets are getting fuzzier.

Gartner first talked about this in 2001 as Real-Time Infrastructure. IBM focused on “On Demand” which has been morphing over time but is still essentially a core part of their strategy. HP had Adaptive Enterprise (and Infrastructure) which shifted toward Adaptive Infrastructure and is still core to them today. Microsoft had Dynamic Systems Initiative, which became Dynamic IT – their vision behind the architecture for internal IT and for their cloud offering, the Azure Services Platform. VMware has Virtual Data Center Operating System and vCloud. And on and on.

I hear Harry Nilsson singing: “Everybody’s talking at me, I don’t hear a word they’re saying…”

Here are the words: unification, virtualization, cloud, adaptive, real-time, simplification.

We’ll see what Cisco delivers, but what is apparent is that the comfortable sandboxes in which different IT vendors sat are shattering. Those words demand that computing become a much more flexible, unified fabric. Unified to deliver on service levels. Services-oriented. Selling components is not the name of the game – making it all work together is.

What is also apparent is there are many vendor attempts to achieve this, and they all bring their current strengths and products to bear to unify a portion of the fabric. I believe Cisco’s announcement may be “one large step for a vendor, one small step for vendor-kind”. It is safe to say this will be big for Cisco – and big for unifying networking and computing – but it may not be a huge state of the art shift for the industry. It is good to see Cisco aggressively joining the club of vendors pushing the state of the art in infrastructure forward, however.

Finally, what is apparent is that we have to get over the religious argument about whether cloud computing can only be used to describe “what Amazon delivers” or mega-monstrous-external-service-providers, or unknown and unknowable computing capability in the ether. There is huge industry energy pushing in the direction that will make internal computing more real-time, on demand, adaptive, dynamic, unified. Cisco is undoubtedly a part of that push. What was custom will become packaged, and we will see a growth both in the numbers of cloud computing providers and in the number of organizations that feel they are building “private clouds” to be used only by their internal customers.

Where “the sun keeps shining through the pouring rain.”

(Photo by John Costa)

The first is the overall challenge of gaining a “loftier” role in the enterprise. In other words, expanding their influence beyond the networking experts, and increasing their overall value to the enterprise. As servers and storage and networking become more and more virtualized, there is a growing opportunity to provide service level intelligence that automates how the server, storage and networking capacity is orchestrated to meet service level requirements. The risk for Cisco is that the network could be relegated to the role of commodity plumbing (and Cisco’s history of using third parties for network management make this a continued risk). The opportunity is that Cisco could take increased responsibility in providing the intelligence to ensure service levels beyond just the network, including server and storage assets. In other words, turn “the network is the platform” into “the network is the service provider”. This will include, of course, the actual delivery of services (through collaboration software and telepresence, for example). I’m not sure Cisco is focused on this challenge enough – the “Intelligent Information Network” strategy has been there for several years, but I don’t believe they have much to show for it.

The second is the “lofty” opportunity presented by cloud computing, and here I think there is much more promise for Cisco. Cloud computing disintermediates the traditional solution platform providers, such as Microsoft, from customers. Windows isn’t going away, but more and more services will be offered from the cloud, rather than installed and managed on specific on-premises platforms. This seems to me to be a huge opportunity for Cisco to move into market adjacencies, especially software that enables the networking of people or companies. Don’t just think simple collaboration software. Think service brokering across clouds, networking cloud services together to deliver solutions. The opportunity is huge. Is Cisco ready to go for it?

Already, Cisco is promoting their WebEx flagship. And their acquisition of PostPath shows their commitment to extend into many broader areas of services based in software that enable collaboration. As Mr. Chambers said in response to my question, “Cisco is, and will be more.” The only things required are big bets. Mr. Chambers pointed out a significant leadership change at Cisco. In the past, they had two or three major priorities they focused on per year. This year, they have 26 – and his expectation is that these priorities will go from vision to execution much, much faster. Aggressive enough? Maybe.

Cisco likes to focus on market transitions, rather than competitors. Well, here we are. The only question is whether Cisco will place the big bets large and fast enough. My bet is that Cisco will be one of the vendors that flourishes and expands into many new markets as cloud computing becomes a reality.

Here’s an excerpt from the discussion, before we got into the challenges listed above:

On Monday, my “Virtualization” presentation focuses on virtualization as a catalyst for change in data centers and in business use of IT; virtualization as a part of overall infrastructure evolution; alternate delivery models enabled by the abstraction of virtualization at many layers; cloud computing as an example that is enabled by virtualization concepts; discussion of the VMware vs. Microsoft choices, and the role of the Xen-based players; virtualization as a change agent in operating system architectures, client computing, software pricing and licensing, IT chargeback, management processes; virtualization as a force eliminating market boundaries and changing the competitors. I give specific advice on how to navigate these changes. And all in an hour!

My “Future of Infrastructure” presentation covers the gamut of infrastructure and operations trends, including automation, server fabrics, storage changes, unified communications, client application delivery, virtualization 3.0, ten approaches to infrastructure cost reduction, and Gartner’s Infrastructure and Operations Maturity Model. A fundamental message is that the future of infrastructure looks a lot like private cloud computing.

On Tuesday, I’ll have a discussion on stage with John Chambers. My conversation will be focused on Cisco’s relevance to the business (not just networking), Cisco’s role in servers and virtualization, Cisco’s part in making networks intelligent – including managing their own products, green IT and energy efficiency, and Cisco’s role in cloud computing – including as a software provider. Should be fun. I believe this will also be webcasted publicly on gartner.com. I’ll report back after the discussion (Tuesday evening).