Who Are You? What Do You Mean By Cloud?

It's very frustrating as a consumer and a commercial organization to wade through the many vendors and consultants who talk about bringing "cloud" to the IT organization.  How do I know?  Because my clients tell me.  Not only are my client friends trying to figure out a concise repeatable definition to "sell" internally to their management and business teams -but they are also being bombarded with vendors saying the latest buzz words and claiming to take them on the journey.  The term "cloud" has different connotations depending on an IT professional's (consultant's) products, offerings, or place within the eco system.

That being said, I've been asked to create some examples to hopefully illustrate some thoughts on how to interpret 'who's who' -among the landscape.  This will enable the right conversations in the right context when inviting (or ignoring) the next "cloud" expert to the office.

In this diagram we can see that this is merely ONE source of data demonstrating why having conversations about adapting to the cloud are important.  We can definitely see the trend of importance the topic is to most CIOs.  I find that having statistics to support the importance (to IT management) is becoming less important, as many IT decision makers consider it a given, that the cloud model is now unavoidable -just as virtualization is unavoidable in the enterprise now.  However, business decision makers will benefit from these kinds of statistics so they can validate the thoughts of those who influence IT.

We are beginning to see three primary categories of companies emerging to produce, support, and consume cloud related concepts and offerings (see gears example).  It is important to understand that each of these are interconnected and need each other just as gears within a pocket watch need to be connected and well adjust for each other.  The three primary categories are 1. IT Providers (which I describe as the traditional VAR), 2. Professional Services Around Cloud Services (These are the pros who design, broker, and execute application & support for cloud applications), and 3. Those who actually Provide IT Products and Services online, as "off premise" IT.

In this example we take the concept of these three types of companies and stand them up to each other.  Aside from what their category titles describe, how do we explain what they do in detail? 

Within each of these stacks - each may include three areas of specialties Applications, Platforms, and Infrastructures.  Do not forget this concept of specialties.  I'll try to create a better diagram to illustrate this in the future.

1. IT Providers -These companies are what I consider traditional VARs who sell cloud hardware and software.  This hardware and software may include (but is not limited to): Cisco (Call Manager, Nexus, UCS), Juniper, Xigo, IBM (i or pSeries, Power Servers, blades, LPAR, PowerVM, AIX), EMC (Celerra, Data Domain, AVAMAR), Commvault, Symantec, Dell (blades, Equallogic, Optiplex), HP (Proliant, EVA), Doubletake, Vizioncore, Oracle, SQL, Lotus Notes, Exchange, and of course VMware -to name a few.
2. Service Providers Around (for) Cloud Services - This category are companies who provide Consulting, Training, Integration, and Support.  Basically they are professionally providing services for End-Users of cloud applications / services.  An example would be a company who would professionally design and build out a VCE (VMware, Cisco, EMC) vBlock -and be certified and contracted to support it.  Another example would be an Amazon EC2 company who specializes in building Amazon applications and works directly with Amazon on behalf of its commercial client to support the application and the ends users.
3. Products and Services - In this category companies provide online (off-premise and on-premise) applications to be consumed by a defined end-user group.  Examples here would include Google Apps, Carbonite, EC2, and anyone who has an online Service Catalog (much like Apple iStore).  More examples that are becoming even more popular are Multi-tenant racks, servers, storage, network devices; hosted virtual desktop farms; managed VoIP; and Virtual Data Centers.  One very new example is the iPhone app by Chase bank (it enables a consumer to take a photo of a check, then cash the check by submitting the image online to Chase). Expect numerous forms of custom branding to happen here -as each new provider will need to differentiate themselves from these generic classifications.

   Recommendations:

1. Phased approaches to using any of these categories of vendors will best introduce this next generation ecosystem into your vendor and partner list. 
2. Building private clouds (to be on-premise) will be a next big wave of innovation within the traditional commercial or enterprise data center.  It will be unavoidable, because IT departments will be deciding to compete or partner with larger well established cloud businesses. 
3. Remove under utilized hardware and software out of the budget.
4. Re-direct highly skilled professionals (operators, administrators, and architects, etc) towards revenue generating tasks within the company (ie, someone who is MCSE certified and designs / supports the online directory services for your application's security -should not be be swapping out tapes and doing tape restores for the accounting department if someone accidentally deletes an old spreadsheet).
5. Ecosystem gaps will continue to develop and mature.  In the diagram below (Sections A, B, and C) will provide success of the overall 3 categories we have defined.  Explore the areas you will "fill" the gaps, or look for experts to assist you in these areas.  An example of Section C, is a company named i365 (formerly EVault now a Seagate company).  i365 is both an off premises IT provider and they offer software services and consulting for other cloud providers to host on their own.
6. There will be an elite tier (4th category) of expert and providers.  Basically, the triple threat -but will have to find the right balance in partnerships so there are no conflict of interests across clients, partners, and themselves.  Look to them for advice, in each area to validate other niche approaches to cloud.

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Comments

[Brad Brunner]

I obviously left out the OEMs and manufacturers from my landscape map of the market. I think it is a given that they feed and consult solutions that hold up the 3 (perhaps 4) categories defined in diagram #5 (the last slide). I’d be interested in hearing you feedback on defining better / more appropriate category terms. Thoughts?? Thanks!