A Starter Private Cloud For IT

So, it's happening more frequently now.

We go into a large enterprise customer, or perhaps one of our partners, and do our private cloud presentation.

We talk about fully virtualized environments, new operational models, and how VMware, Cisco and EMC are working together to accelerate this world.

And then something very interesting happens with increasing frequency.

Normal Expectations

Normally, when you go in and present these sorts of big pictures, people react in predictable ways. 

They may probe on the reality of the technology.  They may ask who else is doing this sort of thing.  They may want you to contrast and compare with what other vendors are doing.  They may want some follow-up sessions with other members of their team to understand one aspect or another better.

All of this is normally considered "good" when talking about technology directions.  And we get plenty of these sorts of reactions.

But, once in a while, we get a completely different sort of reaction.  The first few times it happened, I was caught off guard.  But now I'm seeing it again and again, and I'm willing to call the trend.

Basically, the CIO wants to short-circuit normal processing and engagement models. 

And the reasons why we're seeing this more frequently speaks volumes to current IT thinking.

The Scene

We're sitting in a conference room with some really senior IT people from the customer.  The senior person in the room asks a question like "how quickly can you get one of those in here?". 

The other customer attendees do a double-take, as well as the vendor people in the room.

No discussion of pricing or use case.  No "let's run them through the usual process" thinking.  Just a simple and direct question.

What's going on here?  Actually, it's pretty reasonable once you start figuring it out.

It's All About Unmet Needs

In every large IT organization, there's always one group or another with "unmet needs".  They can't easily get what they need from IT. 

These are the user groups who are most likely to use an external cloud service -- with or without IT's approval.  These are the people lobbying for IT to get into more cloud-like approaches -- and making noise with executive management.

In some organizations, these are the people doing R+D or technical computing.  In other organizations, perhaps it's the application developers.  Or the analysts doing business analytics.  Or perhaps it's a group of very vocal power users who want the superior productivity of a VDI experience.

Standard IT procedures and architectures don't meet the needs of these groups.  Fail to meet their needs, and IT will lose control of an important constituency.

Indeed, as you drill down into the preciously few examples of brand-name corporations using external cloud services such as Amazon et. al., you'll usually find a user constituency with unmet needs.

Go back and look at these sample user groups I've outlined.  In most cases, they're responsible for creating significant business value for their organizations they work in.  If they organize themselves, they're more than capable of having enough clout to go outside the firewall to get what they need.

The Need For Speed

Smart IT leaders are starting to realize that they have a very short window indeed to serve the needs of these internal constiuencies, otherwise they'll find something outside the firewall and outside of IT's control, and headaches are likely to ensue.

Hence the need for speed: get something up and running to show progress to these internal user groups just as fast as possible.  Make it look very self-service-y and very cloud-like.  Point it at unmet needs rather than traditional IT workloads.

How The Discussion Quickly Shifts

First of all, traditional IT concerns like "stability" and "security" and "availability" and "integration with existing environment" tend to be less important here.  Anything you put in front of these users is far better than what they have today, which is -- well -- nothing.

Second, the traditional IT procurement process wants to be short-circuited in these situations.  There won't be any detailed technical evaluation, followed by an RFI, followed by an RFP, followed by multiple rounds of vendor proposals.  As long as the technology (and the supporting vendors) are relatively mainstream, it's off to the races.

Third, the IT customer will need someone from the vendor to build and run this, at least initially.  These are relatively new technologies, and they come together in relatively new ways. 

More importantly, the operational models are very different than traditional IT workflows.  We're talking near-zero-touch IT processes here, including self-service portals for end users.  Not many IT organizations have processes in place for this sort of thing.

Now, it's clear that most IT organizations could do the above stuff -- given enough time and resource -- but the "need for speed" results in a preference to "get to good" as quickly as possible, and then retrofit back into the existing processes and procedures.

So, How Is It Going?

Too soon to tell, to be honest.  We're right in the middle of a bunch of these.  It's a little chaotic and hectic, not only within EMC, but with our partners VMware and Cisco.  Understandably, we're all set up for more traditional IT evaluation and procurement cycles.

We're somewhat fortunate that a lot of the integration and pre-fabrication work has already been done as part of various solutions work.  There are a few bits that need to be stretched and twisted, but at least we're not starting from a standing start.

That being said, the newness of it all won't last very long.  Before too long, we'll have a decent number of IT organizations that have stood up one of these "starter" or "baby" or "proof of concept" private clouds, pointed it at a big pile of unmet user needs, and we'll have some learnings to share.  And that's pretty cool when you think about it.

What Does All Of This Mean?

Personally, I think this is just great.  We, as an industry, can get wrapped up in all sorts of paralysis-by-analysis.  We tend to endlessly debate esoteric points, and then take perfectly good technological thinking and encrust it with decades of organizational legacy.

It's nice to see a few forward-thinking IT leaders take the plunge, so to speak.  And whether they're getting pushed or pulled into the new waters might be irrelevant in the broader scheme of things.

I'll keep you posted :-)

Comments

[David Vellante]

Hi Chuck,

Two questions on which I'd be interested in your opinion: In your estimation...1) how long is 'before too long?' Year, 2 years, 6 mos? and 2) what percent of the 'decent number' of IT organizations will be moving stuff around between internal and external clouds...vs say building a virtual data center for their internal organization as a way to fill those unmet gaps? 100%? 5%? 50/50?

Thanks!