Jim Kaskade

So as we talk about the level of adoption of “IaaS” and “PaaS”, I always have to segment the market first….in terms of both customer profile (Large Enterprise vs. SMB) AND delivery model (Private, Virtual Private, and Public). This discussion, of course, does not include anything around SaaS deployments. That’s a whole separate dimension which would break my picture above.

The Enterprise Datacenter Mix

When you talk to Fortune 1000 CIOs you will begin to hear about “data center consolidation” and “data center outsourcing”. The general rule is try to move to a 30%/70% split/mix (30% in-house and completely under your control, and 70% under managed service…whether that be in your data center or your MSP’s data center).

I represent the scenario where some enterprises may “co-locate” their boxes but maintain 100% control….thus, you see the “Enterprise” bubble spreading from private to virtual private.

Where MSPs Fit

The MSPs are in a growing market where they deploy virtual private IaaS and PaaS solutions for big enterprises (all the big System Integrators are moving into this space as well). I like to think that Rackspace has a big play here, along with the many telecos and hosting companies who are looking to “grow up” and take advantage of the private cloud movement.

The Technology Providers

The players I’ve shown above (VMware, Ret Hat, Citrix, RAX/OpenStack, and I barely convinced myself to add Oracle) are providers of private cloud infrastructure for both the enterprise and the Managed Services space, of course. This is truly where the money is being spent. Notice I don’t have IBM, HP, BMC, Novell, and other more traditional data center management players listed (yeap, they are being made irrelevant).

SMBs Embrace Public

Lastly, I have SMBs being 100% serviced by the public players in both IaaS and PaaS (I listed more PaaS here, but still leaving out many names including Joyent, EngineYard, and others). And this graphic is NOT meant to say that players like Rackspace can’t/don’t/won’t service SMBs….it’s not the most lucrative market. So I’m biasing/simplifying the picture by saying that they NEED to move into more high-end offerings, providing Terramark-like services to larger players.

And, yes, some SMBs grow up and leverage their own private cloud infrastructure. However, this really means that they’ve become a larger enterprise (e.g. Zynga), or they are “medium-sized” companies and are working with less expensive / smaller private cloud configurations with companies like Eucalyptus.

The Other Guys

So I had to include our buddies at Eucalyptus in this simple graphic too….representing the MANY smaller private cloud infrastructure players who address the SMB space (sorry to say though, many venture-backed private cloud infrastructure companies will struggle to reach escape velocity and move into the larger enterprise and managed service space….unless they are purchased, like Cloud.com).

This is just another simple view of the landscape which I used to address a group of cloud-savvy peers and cloud-knowledge wannabes…for what it’s worth. 😉