The “New Infrastructure”, as Steve referred to it as, is a combination of VSphere 4.1 + vCenter + vCloud Director + VShield. However, vCloud Director, isn’t quite what we all had hoped it would be.

According to my meeting with Shane Lowry, engineering manager for the product, the vCloud Director product has come a long way over the last two years (since the project was started), but it still has a long way to go to really provide the industry with something “transformative”.

With over 160 people spread across the globe generating over 500K lines of code to date, the product immediately strikes you as an elegant flex application. But what I wanted to know is what’s behind the aggregation of vCenters into a single console?

According to Shane, the hardest part (or greatest accomplishment) of the development over the last 2 years falls into two areas:

1. Resource Management: The ability to manage cloud resources and VSphere resources by “organization”. In other words, you can obtain a view of virtual resources used by department (e.g. finance, IT, and sales).

2. Security / Networking: The VMs and vApps (collections of VMs) are configured to run on virtual networks which are easily deployed, viewed, and managed. For example, a collection of VMs could be deployed on a vApp network which is further broken down into a “finance internal network” and a “finance managed service provider network”….the first being a private network, and the second a public network.

More to come….I’m still trying to understand what VMware does to assist in the provisioning of  network and security on the physical machine?

Other questions I still need to answer is how easy is it to discover, migrate, and manage workloads between the customer’s data center and a managed service provider?

When will we see the results of work done by Jcloud and others to open up vCloud to non-VMware public clouds (like Amazon)?

Can I abstract the application workload from the infrastructure layer with a descriptive language / abstraction layer which enables seamless migration? (aka when do I get access to project ‘Darwin’?)

Lots of unanswered questions….

Most people in the industry believe that Cloud Computing will have a major impact on what enterprises and their CIOs do in the future. That said, there are two important ways to view the Cloud:

1) as a computing architecture (I also refer to it as an  “Enterprise Cloud Architecture”)…as a way to aggregate IT resources together to achieve much greater levels of efficiency and scalability and more flexible management; and

2) as a Service….whereby the enterprise utilizes IT resources that are provided by an external vendor. Both are very important aspects of the Cloud.

The Enterprise Cloud Architecture will be important in how internal IT is deployed, and every forward-thinking CIO and their organization needs to be thinking about how they will build their internal cloud that will allow them to utilize their resources more efficiently, and manage application workloads in a more flexible way. IT organizations will also be leveraging external clouds, and these two varieties of cloud will need to work together. The future of cloud will not be an “either or” (either internal or external), but more about managing a hybrid environment where IT can take advantage of both internal and external cloud with common infrastructure and common management.

It is interesting that the major advantages of having a cloud environment are the very things that VMware is struggling to provide to its customers:

1. flexible architecture for running applications, and

2. having a choice of running your applications either internally and/or externally.

Why do I say this? Because, the big question as we look at the offerings from the leader in the space is whether we really maximize “flexibility” and truly get the level of “choice” we need. I believe the ultimate level of flexibility and choice equates to an environment that is hardware agnostic (not just vBlocks), hypervisor agnostic (not just ESX), and internal or external cloud agnostic (not just vCloud and vCloud Express).

VMware believes they are going to begin to address this with their new offering to be announced next week called vCloud Service Director (code-named Redwood).

vCloud Service Director (code-named Redwood)

There’s been a lot of discussion on the street about VMware’s vCloud Service Director (vCSD). Details of VMware’s cloud computing product plans were revealed back in June, and will be formally announced next week at the Moscone Center, San Francisco during their VMWorld 2010 conference.

vCloud Service Director, codenamed Project Redwood, is a set of VMware technologies that provide the interface, automation, and management tools to tie VMware environments in the enterprise into private clouds and link them seamlessly with outside service providers running its vCloud Express service. The vCloud Express technology basically enables MSPs to offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) based on VMWare. This directly competes with solutions from companies selling their own cloud “stack” to enable IaaS. Such players include: Openstack, Eucalyptus, OpenNebula, Enomaly, Nimbula, Cloud.com, Enstratus, Elastra, Kaavo, Abiquo, Appistry, Noliosoft…to name a few.

Creating a private cloud out of internal virtual infrastructure resources was a thing of the future until the above players began developing the “stacks” needed to provide “IaaS in a box”. Now the concept of connecting private clouds to public clouds for additional resources is somewhat theoretical.

The glue required to connect the resources together across internal and external infrastructures and manage them through a single pane of glass, is not simple. You look at leaders in public cloud management like RightScale and they will be the first to admit that moving the Amazon paradigm into other cloud environments is a far future (even then it will be a glue-job with connectors and converters that won’t be the most elegant solution).

VMware claims vCloud Service Director is the answer….at least for VMware users. Service providers say it can’t happen fast enough while enterprise IT shops have concerns over security and scalability, of course.

Does it really provide flexibility and choice beyond VMware products?

vCloud Service Director will provide enterprises with the following:

• Allow enterprises to create fully-functional internal cloud infrastructure
• Create a broad ecosystem of cloud providers to give enterprises choice in public cloud for burst, test/dev, etc.
• Provide identical interfaces between internal and external clouds to allow toolsets to operate identically with either
• Enable developers on the cloud platform to create new applications within a cloud framework across both private and public

I’m sure VMware, EMC and CISCO would love to see everyone follow the path of a completely packaged solution. If you want hear the details of this, make sure you attend the session MA8027 – Provisioning Cloud Computing on Vblock using VMware vCloud Service Director next week:

This session focuses on provisioning vApps in a cloud environment. Starting with at the hardware layer, provisioning of UCS servers in Vblock architecture, applying server profiles and related policies. Moving up the stack with installing and configuring vSphere, applying host profiles, creating and deploying network/storage policies. Carving out resource, network and storage pools for Cloud computing using VMware vCloud Service Director. Create Service catalogs, apply cost models using Chargeback, deploy vApps in multi-tenant environment.

vCloud Service Director will let users “serve themselves” by creating, using, and managing virtual machines and the application stack (e.g. vApps) while IT maintains control and bills for usage.

VMware’s aim is to build a control and management layer for a vSphere-based virtual infrastructure that controls outside services and internal resources seamlessly.

The VMware solution utilizes a catalog database and a service bus that governs all resource pools. The vCloud Service Director UI runs on VI Clients and works nicely with third party services giving IT and users access to libraries (images) published for accelerated development.

The hope is that VMware will interface other service providers not using ESX through the jclouds Java library that allows API access to public cloud providers and technologies. This, of course, does not promote VMware’s cause of VMwave-enabled MSPs. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Resource management with catalogs of virtual machine images and vApps provide the middle layer, with the vCloud API. The bottom of the vCloud stack comprises the hypervisor, hardware, etc. When the vCloud Service Director is fully implemented, VMware will be able to give users a true cloud computing environment without having to involve any other vendor. You ask me, if I was a CIO of a multi-national corporation this would scare me.

vCloud Service Director will allow multi-tenancy on top of vSphere, so users can create distinct virtual data centers (vDCs) out of one physical data center, or several virtual pools.

vCloud versus Open Source

Many think that you don’t get all the features you need from the open source clouds (aka OpenStack). It will be interesting to see how this changes with contributions like that of the Rackspace and OpenNebula teams. In talking to John Engates (CTO of Rackspace) and Joshua McKenty (Chief Cloud Architect for Nebula), I think some great things are happening in the world of open source. I believe the idea that open is behind is a fact of the past. Visionary CIOs who are challenging “VMware lockin” will quickly see past the deficiencies (which are shrinking) to see the benefits of a hardware, hypervisor, and management software agnostic environment.

vCloud High Availability / SLA

When you analyze the features of VMware HA, FT, and SDR, some business continuity experts are still crying “foul”. With the addition of  App-aware HA using a monitoring API, VMware can leverage 3rd parties to monitor mission critical applications within the VM and notify VCenter and VMware HA to initiate a failover. This is great…however, it still does not address critical RPO and RTO requirements. It only provides a “pseudo application-aware HA” solution, improving slightly on the current VM-level HA.

VMware plans on talking about Host Based Replication (HBR) which will allow IT to replicate VM’s between dissimilar storage (However, it’s not clear that the product will be ready this year). With this, IT can replicate from an ESX local hard drive to a storage array in a different location. This technology, as a part of SRM, will allow IT to protect a remote location as if you had replicating storage arrays in common between it and your main datacenter.

SRM will also allow you to replicate individual VM’s as part of a protection strategy. This replication will be done without guest agents and is managed inside SRM.

Unfortunately, the application of host-based monitoring and failover (true application level HA) is still limited and the ability to manage HA/DR of mission critical applications across physical and virtual and heterogeneous virtualized environments is still impossible. VMware will have to make some significant announcements to truly provide a solution which addresses the market’s needs.

vCloud Security

For  vCSD to really take off, VMware will have to announce it’s support for two or three-factor authentication for administrators, and the ability for secure VPN access for administrators.

What’s also missing is the ability to truly analyze SLA compliance and enforce it. We all know that the security group with IT organizations have the ultimate power. How does one finger-print VMs and not only lock down the stacks used within IT, but manage the where, who, when’s associated with VM sprawl from a security perspective?

vCloud Management across all private and public clouds

There is definitely value in merging familiar administrative tools and procedures across private and public clouds. But unless you are talking about merging vCenter, XenCenter, HyperV MMC, CA Spectrum Automation Manager, Tivoli Service Automation Manager, and a host of other management tool consoles, the “single pane of glass” does not become a reality.

Having to use different management tools for local physical, local virtual and cloud can be cumbersome. The current split between managing VMs and physical infrastructures already adds to administrative complexity. What an organization needs is a JSR168 compliant framework that allows IT to build their own Intranet portals based on the collection of tools already deployed.

vCloud resource management

vCloud Service Director will support three modes of resource management:

1. “Allocation pools,” where users are given a ‘container’ of resources and allowed to create and use VMs anyway they like up to the limits of the CPU and storage they paid for;

2. “Reservation pools,” which give users a set of resources they can increase or decrease by themselves and

3. “Pay-per-VM” for single-instance purchasing.

Ideally, this needs to evolve into a single IT resource catalog which combines VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. resources into a single web-based store for internal users.

Virtualization or Cloud Company?

VMware is a virtualization technology company trying to become a cloud computing technology company.

Will companies like Citrix, Microsoft, RedHat, and Oracle just sit on the sidelines and watch VMware turn the company towards IaaS, PaaS, and application services? Will the many fledgling venture-backed companies be able to leverage the power of open source to advance the cause of true interoperability, cross-platform, and non-proprietary?

Looking forward to seeing “VMware’s largest launch yet” next week

I was reviewing the Yankee Group’s controversial report, “Cloud 99.99: The Small Print Exposed” about Cloud vendors offering “enterprises poor service guarantees and limited financial redress if their service fails.” Thomas Wailgum details some of the study here if you’re not a Yankee client.

My response to this is, “Come on guys. You obviously haven’t run a hosted business!” It comes down to the economics. I will argue that you CAN get 99.999, that’s five nines, of availability in the public Cloud, if you are willing to pay for it! And it will still be an order of magnitude cheaper than doing it yourself with your own redundant data centers, server hardware, software, and staff. In my next post, I’m going to detail out the cost of data center vs. the Amazon Cloud with a 5 Nine SLA. Don’t believe me, just wait.

What I couldn’t help but think is that the Government (the Fed), will most likely be deploying a federated cloud architecture. Yeap, the Fed will deploy Federated Cloud. What this means is that it will most likely be a hybrid of on-premise virtualized infrastructure coupled with off-premise virtualized infrastructure…..or private and public cloud.

Is the Fed a “real” opportunity?

Or is it just more hype? Well, that’s what got me to thinking. I’ve been talking to many analysts lately on this very topic. “Who’s going to jump into this Cloud game the most, first?” I asked IDC and Gartner this question. Well, to my surprise they said “Government”.

Courtesy of IDC, the following chart depicts the ideal Cloud targets. From what I understand, there are some detailed reports coming out soon about specific Cloud IT spend by vertical. So stay tuned. But for now, as a provider of Cloud service automation software, I’m following this industry vertical roadmap.

When I read the following, I couldn’t help but chuckle a little.

“The intent of the board is not take away authority from agencies, but to enable them,” Mell, [a senior computer scientist with NIST] said. It would do that by identifying and reviewing cloud computing processes and applications submitted by sponsoring agencies. Once they’ve been authorized, they can be used as building blocks for other agencies, letting them focus on incremental applications, Mell said. It would still be up to agencies to choose whether to use the approved applications.

Yeah right. When you can save two-thirds of your spend on things like email by pushing that IT service into the cloud, this organization was put together to bypass the typical delays associated with governmental agencies. “Step aside, we need to speed up the pace here dammit!”.

Well, kind of…this is a picture of Microsoft’s Chicago data center containers packed with computing power. 

Azure is currently providing “Platform As A Service” to businesses loyal to the MS application suite and ASP.NET web application framework which allows programmers to build dynamic web sites, web applications and web services.

So what does a picture like this mean? Well, it’s not a new computing box you plug power into and set free in the pacific ocean for green cooling. No, it’s simply packed with thousands of servers which are going into Microsoft’s data centers to bring new capacity online to support its growing cloud computing operation. Yeap, look out Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid, Flexiscale, and the like (oh yeah, and lets not forget IBM’s soon to be announced public cloud).

What’s Next For Azure?

Besides building out their data center, Azure needs to move from a PaaS to more of a IaaS in order to provide the flexibility needed for a broader deployment of existing applications which want to execute in the Azure Cloud. 

Easier said than done. The Microsoft team has a lot of work just building out infrastructure, let alone the abilities of enabling customers with a selection of small, medium, large, and extra-large instances of machines running on various versions of Microsoft operating systems. Amazon has been in the business since 2006 and four years might seem like a short period, but it’s not…especially, when it comes to the amount of functionality developed to enable self-service elastic computing.

The clock is ticking….lets see how long it will take the big iron in Chicago data centers to translate into an easy-to-use web interface that allows me to provision a Windows box and load up my legacy Microsoft applications.

It’s always fun to see what others predict will happen.

The more controversial you are, the better….who wants to just hear about “the growth of the market” anyway. So here we go….2010.

Appirio looks deep into their crystal ball here with the following:

1. Cloud developer community grows faster than open-source.
2. Cloud standards won’t (and shouldn’t) happen.
3. Cloud providers tackle lock-in.
4. Cloud integration will get an enterprise poster-child.
5. Enterprise apps get Googled.
6. Enterprise collaboration is a feature, not a business.
7. Microsoft lets Azure cannibalize a global account.
8. Cloud computing consolidation.
9. Global Systems Integrators will do nothing more than cloud marketing.
10. The real innovation will be in the business of cloud computing, not the technology.

Web 20 Journal uses the powers of the supernatural to predict the following here:

1. Cloud Reduces the Effect of the Recession
2. Broader Depth of Clouds
3. VC’s, Money & Long Term Viability
4. Partnerships Galore & Weeding Out of Providers
5. Hybrid Solutions
6. Web 3.0
7. Standards and Interoperability
8. Staggered Growth within the Cloud
9. Technology Advances at the Cloud Molecular Level
10. Larger Adoption

You can hear the chants from IDC’s conference rooms here:

1. Growth will return to the IT industry in 2010. We predict 3.2% growth for the year, returning the industry to 2008 spending levels of about $1.5 trillion.
2. 2010 will also see improved growth and stability in the worldwide telecommunications market, with worldwide spending predicted to increase 3%.
3. Emerging markets will lead the IT recovery, with BRIC countries growing 8–13%.
4. Cloud computing will expand and mature as we see a strategic battle for cloud platform leadership, new public cloud hot spots, private cloud offerings, cloud appliances, and offerings that bridge public and private clouds.
5. It will be a watershed year in the ascension of mobile devices as strategic platforms for commercial and enterprise developers as over 1 billion access the Internet, iPhone apps triple, Android apps quintuple, and Apple’s “iPad” arrives.
6. Public networks — more important than ever — will continue their aggressive evolution to fiber and 3G and 4G wireless. 4G will be overhyped, more wireless networks will become “invisible,” and the FCC will regulate over-the-top VoIP.
7. Business applications will undergo a fundamental transformation — fusing business applications with social/collaboration software and analytics into a new generation of “socialytic” apps, challenging current market leaders.
8. Rising energy costs and pressure from the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference will make sustainability a source of renewed opportunity for the IT industry in 2010.
9. Other industries will come out of the recession with a transformation agenda and look to IT as an increasingly important lever for these initiatives. Smart meters and electronic medical records will hit important adoption levels.
10. The IT industry’s transformations will drive a frenetic pace of M&A activity.

The visions of David Linthicum at InfoWorld here:

1. Rise of cloud computing standards
2. First major cloud computing provider outages
3. Microsoft will be relevant in the cloud
4. Rapid consolidation of existing providers
5. Rapid rise of cloud computing startups

So tempting to add your own isn’t it?

BSM, as the Institute has described it, is a strategic management tool for measuring whether the smaller-scale operational activities of a company are aligned with its larger-scale objectives in terms of vision and strategy.

In balanced scorecard language, vision, mission, and strategy at the corporate level are decomposed into different views, or perspectives, as seen through the eyes of business owners, customers and other stakeholders, managers and process owners, and employees.

Balanced Scorecard in the Clouds?

Lets start by saying that you have the following mission for a company, which simply defines the ‘Purpose, reason for being’, or ‘Who we are and what we do’:

Our Mission is to be a trusted provider of information systems using highly innovative software technology that contributes to the development of society.

Lets expand this with the vision for the company, which can be defined as an ‘Image of the future we seek to create’:

Our Vision is to make the Internet even more accessible by using proprietary and innovative software technologies leveraging open source, collaboration, and the web.

OK. Now comes the strategy. Lets introduce cloud…Cloud Computing is core Information Technology that is predicted to make a disruptive impact on the development of society by leveraging open source, collaborative applications, and, of course, the web. So, in short, “Cloud is the strategy”! I quote a colleague of mine in my last life in online digital media and SaaS, J.D. Lasica:

Over time, the cloud will transform our approach to such fundamental concepts as search, commerce, money and security on a global basis.

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, has called this “the cloud computing age.” Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison, declared that the network would become the computer, and many people now refer to the emerging next-generation Internet as “the cloud.”

As we’ve seen, Cloud can be an awfully broad category (just look at my ecosystem blog entries). But no matter what piece of the Cloud puzzle you propose to offer, the question for any organization is,  ”how do you make sure the details of your cloud strategy match up with the tactics of the greater organization?” or “How do we make sure the cloud strategy is the approach used to accomplish the mission and implement an organization’s vision?”

This is where BSM comes in.

Cloud BSM Step 1

Step one is an assessment of the organization’s foundations, its core beliefs, market opportunities, competition, financial position, short- and long-term goals, and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, an understanding of what satisfies its current and future customers (needs analysis) as it applies to cloud.

This can be performed with a simple off-site meeting where the management team develops, discusses, and documents the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Cloud BSM Step 2

Step two is the development of overall business strategy. This can be both at a high-level as well as a very detailed level. For example, the high-level strategy may be:

To create cloud-based collaborative applications that capture X million end-users within Y years.

The business strategy could then dive deeper. For example:

Provide leading Internet Identity Security, delivering both on-premise software and on-demand services for Internet Single Sign-On (SSO), Identity-Enabled Web Services and Internet User Account Management for both the consumer and enterprise customers.

The strategy is a hypothesis of what we think will work and be successful. Some can conceive of this based purely on “gut”, and others derive it from significant industry, customer, and competitive analysis. I believe this process has to be driven by: 1) customer need, and 2) competitive landscape.

Cloud BSM Step 3

Step three is a decomposition of business strategy into smaller components, called objectives. Objectives are the basic building blocks of strategy at all levels of the organization – the components or activities that make up complete business strategies.

I prefer to define SMART metrics that make up objectives (SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timely). I believe objectives have to be tied to metrics that define the performance of each department of the business (marketing, sales, business development, engineering, operations, HR, finance, etc.), and then, in turn, down to the individual.

Howard Rohm likes to map the strategy and associated metrics to four BSM areas: Financial, Customer, Internal Processes, and Learning/Growth. It’s not unreasonable to make sure that these four aspects of the business are represented within company, department, and individual objectives, but I prefer to map to functional areas of the business first. Call it KMBSM (Kaskade Modified BSM).

Other Outputs of BSM

You can then take the output of this process and use it to build an Operating Plan for the company (the objectives, metrics with targets, and a revenue/expense plan.) This result coupled with the details of all analysis that went into the formulation can be compiled to create the Company’s Business Plan. Some companies like to have a specific Marketing & Sales or Go-To-Market Plan as well (this will detail direct vs. indirect channels, partnerships, pricing, sales tactics, service/warranty, advertising/promotion). Complex engineering projects not only require a product requirements document (PRD), but an overall Engineering Development Plan (consisting mainly of a project plan broken down by tasks, durations, resources, etc.). All this for another post

Interested in platforms that support the Enterprise’s ability to manage this exercise? Try Mindtouch’s collaborative platform for the enterprise here.

1. Cloud Applications (Multi-Tenant + Single-Instance)
2. Cloud Platforms (Multi-Tenant + Single-Instance)
3. Cloud Infrastructure (Multi-Tenant + Single-Instance)
4. Hosted Applications (Single-Tenant or Multi-Instance)
5. Hosted Platforms (Single-Tenant or Multi-Instance)
6. Hosted Infrastructure (Single-Tenant or Multi-Instance)
7. Private Cloud Applications (On-Premise + Virtualized)
8. Private Cloud Platforms (On-Premise + Virtualized)
9. Private Cloud Infrastructure (On-Premise + Virtualized)

Here is a quick highlight of the Appirio matrix. You’ll need to view in “full-screen” mode (”FS”).

.

I believe Troy Angrignon assisted in the creation of this, and contributes to the updates.

Other ecosystem perspectives:

Part 3: Cloud Computing – A Complex Ecosystem?

Part 2: Cloud Computing – A Complex Ecosystem?

Part 1: Cloud Computing – A Complex Ecosystem?

When you read articles like this one from Information Week by Charles Babcock…well, the quick answer is YES…there is still confusion:

“Despite the frequent use of the term, it still means different things to different people. That was evident at the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo this week in Santa Clara, where I thought I would find consensus.”

So what do the experts in the field say? Here are a few Industry Analysts who collect their definitions from discussions with many cloud company CEOs, CIOs, and the like.

Gartner

Thomas Bittman's Definition of Cloud

Thomas Bittman, VP Distinguished Analyst defined Cloud Computing in a webinar here:

Cloud Computing: A style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using Internet technologies.

Gartner provides their in-depth view of cloud here.

IDC

IDC analyst Frank Gens defines cloud on his blog here, as follows:

Cloud Services = Consumer and Business products, services and solutions that are delivered and consumed in real-time over the Internet

Cloud Computing = an emerging IT development, deployment and delivery model, enabling real-time delivery of products, services and solutions over the Internet (i.e., enabling cloud services)

Frank details his definition a bit more here….and I can’t help but love the detailed data IDC provides on Cloud Service Revenue forecasts here.

Forrester/Jupiter Research

James Staten, Principal Analyst at Forrester, shared the Forrester definition of cloud here as follows:

A standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered via Internet technologies in a pay-per-use, self-service way.

You can find much more on their blog here. As some may recall, Forrester acquired Jupiter Research in late 2008.

The 451 Group

Dan Kusnetzky,  Rachel Chalmers and others on the team have provided a definition as part of of a report, Partly Cloudy – Blue-Sky Thinking About Cloud Computing, which can be found here. The definition is as follows:

‘Cloud computing’ describes a service model that combines a general organizing principle for IT delivery, infrastructure components, an architectural approach and an economic model – basically, a confluence of grid computing, virtualization, utility computing, hosting and software as a service (SaaS).

Or, put more simply, the cloud is IT, presented as a service to the user, delivered by virtualized resources that are independent of location.

You can see more about 451’s cloud perspective on their blog here.

AMR Research

Bruce Richardson and others at AMR have provided the following definition of cloud and compare it to SaaS here:

Cloud computing is the next-generation of software as a service, in which a complete software environment is licensed as a subscription from a software vendor and low-cost, secure, and dependable IT hardware infrastructure is ‘rented’ from a utility-computing provider on demand. The customer has complete control over its own secure and private IT environment at a very low cost and without the hassle of procuring and managing its own data center. It can quickly scale IT resources up or down as computing needs change. And [the customer] has complete freedom to customize the solution as it sees fit and complete control over upgrade cycles and all other aspects of its IT environment.

More about cloud from AMR here.

Burton Group

Burton Group defines cloud computing as:

The set of disciplines, technologies, and business models used to render IT capabilities as on-demand services.

You can read more from Jamie Lewis, Drue Reeves and others on their blog here.

THINKstrategies

Jeff Kaplan provides IT perspective on his blog here. Jeff defines cloud here, as follows:

A set of web-based tools and services which permit users to acquire computing resources and development capabilities to build or support applications, or perform specific IT functions on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Yankee Group

Agatha Poon and Camille Mendler at Yankee discuss cloud here. Agatha’s recent definition of cloud at Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in Santa Clara was consistent with her blogged definition here:

”dynamically scalable, virtualized information services delivered on demand over the Intenet with multitenant capability, service-level agreements (SLAs) and usage-based pricing.”

MWD Advisors

In Neil Ward-Dutton’s recent report, “Strategic Insight: Exploring the business value of Cloud Computing” found here, MWD provides the following definition of cloud computing:

Cloud Computing is a model of technology provision where capacity on remotely hosted, managed computing platforms, on which applications can be developed and/or deployed, is made publicly available and rented to multiple customers on a self-service basis. Cloud Computing resource capacity is provided through a “utility” model – it’s licensed and paid for based on consumption, rather than being purchased in perpetuity through a traditional technology licensing model. In addition, a Cloud Computing provider isn’t only responsible for delivering functionality; it’s also responsible for providing customers with agreed levels of service (performance, reliability, scalability, availability and security and so forth).

Enterprise Strategy Group

Mark Bowker and Steve Duplessie are the minds behinds ESG’s cloud perspective with blogs here, and here respectively. Mark gives his early definition here:

‘Cloud computing’ is nothing more than a service model where business workloads are deployed, transparently executed internally or somewhere on the Internet, and businesses only pay for what they consume. Rather than purchase servers, storage, and other pieces of IT equipment, businesses simply purchase a set of dials and indicators that finely-tune and adjust IT performance, availability, data protection, and security based on business requirements regardless of the actual physical location of the applications and data.

GigaOM

Although not your true analyst group (and more a news group), I still think of Stacey Higginbotham as an expert in the field. She provides a more involved definition here, as follows:

Although it is difficult to come up with a precise and comprehensive definition of cloud computing, at the heart of it is the idea that applications run somewhere on the “cloud” (whether an internal corporate network or the public Internet) – we don’t know or care where.

Taken to the next step,…cloud computing infrastructures….should ideally have these characteristics:

• Self-healing: In case of failure, there will be a hot backup instance of the application ready to take over without disruption (known as failover). It also means that when I set a policy that says everything should always have a backup, when such a fail occurs and my backup becomes the primary, the system launches a new backup, maintaining my reliability policies.
• SLA-driven: The system is dynamically managed by service-level agreements that define policies such as how quickly responses to requests need to be delivered. If the system is experiencing peaks in load, it will create additional instances of the application on more servers in order to comply with the committed service levels — even at the expense of a low-priority application.
• Multi-tenancy: The system is built in a way that allows several customers to share infrastructure, without the customers being aware of it and without compromising the privacy and security of each customer’s data.
• Service-oriented: The system allows composing applications out of discrete services that are loosely coupled (independent of each other). Changes to or failure of one service will not disrupt other services. It also means I can re-use services.
• Virtualized: Applications are decoupled from the underlying hardware. Multiple applications can run on one computer (virtualization a la VMWare) or multiple computers can be used to run one application (grid computing).
• Linearly Scalable: Perhaps the biggest challenge. The system will be predictable and efficient in growing the application. If one server can process 1,000 transactions per second, two servers should be able to process 2,000 transactions per second, and so forth.
• Data, Data, Data: The key to many of these aspects is management of the data: its distribution, partitioning, security and synchronization. New technologies, such as Amazon’s SimpleDB, are part of the answer, not large-scale relational databases. And don’t let the name fool you. As my colleague Nati Shalom rightfully proclaims, SimpleDB is not really a database. Another approach that is gaining momentum is in-memory data grids.

More about cloud from GigaOM here.

Freeform Dynamics

Dale Vile presents Freeform’s first impressions here, defining cloud as follows:

Cloud computing…is about the evolution of dynamic virtualised infrastructure that allows us to think more in terms of resource pools than individual IT components. This in turn opens the door to delivering computing resource on a utility basis, which is equally applicable both internally (i.e. with regard to the way you use your data centre) and externally – which takes you into the realm of utility computing and software as a service.

You find more on Cloud and IT from Freeform here.

RedMonk

Michael Monk doesn’t really define cloud. He starts out acknowledging that a definition is needed, but then continues to elaborate here.

Before cloud computing was all the rage, if you recall, we were all nuts about Software-as-a-Service, one of the funner tech initializations – “SaaS”! Once Amazon introduced EC2, SalesForce Force.com, and others followed, we needed some more categorization to differentiate and understand these things. “We” being industry pundits & vendors. Thus, we arrive at the 3 *aaS’s of cloud computing.

SaaS depends on PaaS, depends on IaaS. The wider world probably cares more about actually doing something – SaaS – than having middleware to build something – PaaS – and care more about those two things than having a bunch of instances with that annoyingly calm blinking command like cursor – IaaS.

More from Michael about cloud can be found here.

Hurwitz & Associates

Judith Hurwitz offers up her defintion and blogs the industry here:

Cloud computing is the next stage in the evolution of the Internet. The cloud in cloud computing provides the means through which everything — from computing power to computing infrastructure, applications, business process to personal collaboration — can be delivered to you as a service wherever and whenever you need.

The cloud has several key characteristics: elasticity and scalability, self-service provisioning, standardized APIs, billing and metering of services, performance monitoring and measuring, and security. There are three models for Cloud: Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a service.

Ovum

David Mitchell, John Maden and Laurent Lachal are quoted quite a bit on cloud. But unless you’re a paying customer, the Ovum/Datamonitor/Butler Group isn’t as forthright with online disclosures/opinions let alone definitions as some of the other analyst groups.

Nemertes Research

John Burke and Andreas Antonopoulos at Nemertes frequently comment on IT in their blogs here and here respectively.

ABI Research

The analysts over at ABI have decided to stick to their core, that being mobile. In their report, mobile cloud computing, Mark Beccue and others highlight that mobile cloud applications move the computing power and data storage away from mobile phones and into the cloud, bringing apps and mobile computing to not just smartphone users but a much broader range of mobile subscribers.

Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan research and report on Cloud Computing as seen here. However, the IT research team is generally very tight lipped with their research….unless you are a paying customer. They don’t seem to actively promote their perspective in cloud within their IT research services.

Wikipedia

Per wikipedia here:

Cloud computing is Internet- (”cloud-”) based development and use of computer technology (”computing”).[1] In concept, it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer need knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them.[2] It typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources as a service over the Internet.[3][4]

Had enough yet? I’m sure we could poll a few CEOs of cloud service/product providers as well as a few CIOs of cloud technology users…but I suspect their defintions are similar. Did I miss you? Please comment on your analyst group and cloud definition.

Holy Grail

The market changes constantly….new competition; old rivals offering new functionality or new marketing spins; customers’ needs changing. Couple this with internal management challenges; board, shareholder, and/or investor pressures. Being an executive is only getting harder with what I’ll refer to as information overload.

How do executives keep an efficient eye on both external and internal metrics that count and manage their enterprise data? Is this Enterprise 2.0 or E2.0?

I envision that the first thing I see when I start my day, is an internal view of the entire company…across every functional area, every line of business. Combine this with an external view of the market in which the company operates – an “executive dashboard” if you will. But it has to be more than just reporting – it must pull together all the  enterprise business analytics needed by execs. Make this web-based and available from the office, my laptop, my home computer, and even my mobile phone.

As the CEO, I might have an area of the dashboard where I can shoot a live video (from my webcam) or upload a more polished video to show to executives, key individuals, or all employee’s….a morning video-cast for all to wake up to.

I can envision columns of information that are organized to provide me status of key groups within the organization and provide direct links to their team leads and internal communities in general. Major applications used by each group would also be provided in one centralized “mashup”.

Executive Dashboard

Integration with the major enterprise applications including: teleconference (e.g. Cisco WebEx), email (e.g. MSFT Exchange), CRM (e.g. Salesforce), and ERP (e.g. SAP) packages is an absolute given.

At my last SaaS company, as the CEO, I (and my staff) maintained the following information / dashboards…it seemed almost as difficult as flying a helicopter just to get everything into one place, let alone updates, and the content right:

1. Board of Directors (Investor) Company Dashboard
2. Sales / Biz Dev Pipeline Dashboard (Direct & Channel)
3. Financial Dashboard (Cashflow, Op Budget, P&L, BS)
4. Operational Dashboard (platform/CDN/infrastructure spend)
5. Platform Dashboard (SaaS customer usage statistics)
6. Online Lead-Gen Dashboard (signups)
7. Marketing Dashboard (campaigns, PR)
   

   Information Overload?

8. Monetization Dashboard (we managed an ad-network)
9. Customer Support Dashboard (free to paid conversion focus, satisfaction, profiling)
10. Content Dashboard (use of digital content, content campaigns)
11. Engineering Dashboard (development project status)
12. Content Moderation Dashboard (outsourced platform cost)
13. Product Strategy / Roadmap Dashboard (prioritized development)

This doesn’t even begin to include all the supporting documentation that you and your staff iterate on. Of course, you can comb the old Intranet hierarchies, your personal computer directories, your email folders, and the like….but it can become unmanageable (not just for you, but your staff).

Have any of you ever felt you had the enterprise under complete control? Or are you a victim of information overload like the rest of us?

IDC_White_Paper_on_Information_Overload