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Too many clouds? In San Francisco? Never!
I enjoyed attending the Open Source Business Conference yesterday, here in my home town, San Francisco. In addition to taking in some sessions, I enjoyed being part of a panel with fellow CEOs Lawrence Guillory (Racemi), Bill Karpovich (Zenoss), along with Stephen O’Grady of RedMonk and moderated by Cade Metz from Wired.com.
Our topic was ostensibly whether cloud marketing and hype was getting ahead of the reality on the ground. It really turned in a more free-wheeling discussion on the current state of cloud computing, where the challenges and opportunities are for the future and how open source is positioned to capture those opportunities against incumbents like VMware and Microsoft.
It would be unrealistic to try and capture and entire 50 minute discussion in a blog post, but a few takeaways worth mentioning include:
- Amazon EC2 is the king of the public cloud and why not? It works, it’s easy to implement and, depending on use-case it can be cost effective.
- Amazon is also “training wheels for the cloud.” Businesses use it to learn what is possible and then when they decide to implement their own cloud infrastructure, including private clouds, they build on that experience.
- Implementing a private cloud is not matter of “if,” but “when.” Businesses are already making the decision to implement a cloud strategy. Now, they have to adjust their business operations model in order to take full advantage of what the cloud can offer.
- Open source is leading the way for cloud, but laggard VMWare could close the gap and even pass open source due to its incumbent status in many data centers.
- Data centers are destined to be heterogeneous environments with multiple platforms and technologies working together to form the cloud-based infrastructure.
These are just some of the things we discussed in a very enjoyable session.
My takeaway? Everyone on the panel is in violent agreement that open source is the choice that make the most sense from the technical, platform, no vendor lock-in and cost perspectives. It’s up to us, the vendors in and around open source, to make it happen for our customers.
Did we answer the question as to whether cloud marketing hype was getting in front of the reality on the ground with our customers? I feel we did and the answer is “yes” and “no.” Clearly, as with anything IT, we as vendors have a vested interest in promoting the latest, greatest and shiniest gadget as the next big thing to sell to our customers. So, yes, there is a lot of buzz surrounding the cloud. But our customers are not stupid. They know a pig in a poke when the see it, so if we don’t deliver on our promises, we’re done for. That’s the great thing about the choice that open source represents: there is actually a choice.
So the answer is also “no” – the hype is not outpacing reality. The cloud is real, our customers know it and, most important, they know open source is the best option for their needs.
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