The Cloud Rush Has Officially Begun In Earnest

As I sit back and contemplate the last few weeks, I keep coming to the same conclusion. 

The market has clearly expressed its strong interest in all things cloud-like, and just about every technology vendor on the planet -- large and small -- is frantically repositioning themselves just as quickly as possible.

Whatever "tipping point" we all were waiting for, it's clearly happened.  Game on.

And I think this rapid shift has caught many in the IT industry by surprise: technology vendors, system integrators, consultants -- few people are really interested in IT as usual. 

Everyone wants to talk about the cloud.

Consider the following ...

The New VMworld

In one short year, VMworld appears to have gone from a virtualization event to the de-facto cloud technology event for the industry.

The usual wisecracks and snarkiness around cloud have been strangely absent from the social stream for the last few months.  Cynics -- if they're still out there -- are mostly keeping to themselves these days.

The customer discussion has quickly progress from "what" (what is a cloud and how is it different) through "why" (give me some good reasons why I should do it) and now is firmly entrenched in "how" (as in how do I get going on all of this?).

All in a remarkably short time.

It's pretty clear to most that VMware is (a) leading the infrastructure change in the enterprise (with partners such as EMC and Cisco at their side), (b) making a strong play for the next-generation user experience, and (c) is making serious inroads with the newer crop of service providers that will form the foundation of the next IT ecosystem.

Not to mention starting to seriously warm up on what will likely be the next battlefield -- the new application development stack.

Competitors Respond

Now, in all fairness, I (and EMC) have been working in this area for quite some time. 

If you're interested in a bit of history, go check out this foundational post from January 2009, not to mention the many dozens of posts since then.  It's been an interesting journey, to say the least.  Lots of evangelism and lots of skeptics over the last 18 months.  It's nice to see things turning around.

HP is particularly interesting to watch at this juncture.  Recently, they've been in the news for both losing Mark Hurd as CEO (don't get me started) and paying an enormous sum for 3PAR, which (not surprisingly) has been widely positioned as all about "cloud". 

Please don't roll your eyes; this is how things sometimes work in the high-stakes technology M&A game -- it's all about perceptions.  BTW, congrats to Dave D on the acquisition :-)

In the last few weeks, HP has also been trying to make a bit noise around "private cloud" -- not much in the way of product, solutions or ecosystem -- but -- hey!! -- they're now offering services from their "cloud experts".  Better get your hat in the ring before people forget ...

IBM has been strangely silent in all of this.  Sure, they can tell a cloud-ish story here and there, but if there was any vendor who would have been theoretically poised to capitalize on this once-in-a-career transformation, you'd be looking at them carefully.  So far, not much to really talk about.

Microsoft has recently started to play a new form of hardball -- public letters in USA Today, appealing to FUD, etc. -- which tells me that they're not exactly where they'd like to be.

Dell has been active on the M&A front, buying bits and pieces of what is likely to be a cloud-like stack, but hasn't been very vocal about how they see the market evolving, and -- more importantly -- how they plan to play in it.

I think Oracle is still busy digesting Sun.  Together, they certainly have the assets to be a significant cloud technology player, but -- like IBM and Dell -- seem to be strangely silent.

And from there you go to the component players: CA, BMC, HDS, NetApp, Symantec, et. al.  Each has a view on how they might play in the cloud, but it's only a narrow role at best.  To hear them speak, you'd think the cloud won't happen without them.

And an incredibly strong and growing interest in VCE, Vblocks and Acadia :-)

The Service Providers Heat Up

There has been a rapid and explosive surge in service provider activity over the last year or so.  The discussion is rarely about technology, and more about business: how do we see the market evolving, what is the new pecking order of ecosystems and alliances, and -- ultimately -- how do SPs go about capitalizing on this fundamental shift in IT spending patterns?

At the same time, there's a new-found openness from IT organizations large and small to consider the use external service providers on a scale and scope that's rather refreshing.

I do try and capture some of my thoughts in my other blog, but there's never enough time to really dig into the topics that I'd like to.

Do You Have A Plan?

By now, most IT leaders understand the basic concepts around cloud, and realize that it's going to impact them in one way or another.  Not everyone has the budget or cycles to start implementing, but I would say that there's no good excuse for not investing in the cycles to come up with a plan, our at least the outline of a plan.

Or, if you're not an IT leader, you certainly will have a strong interest in securing the new skills and mindsets that will propel their careers forward during this industry transition.

One thing is for sure: those IT virtualization projects have moved from tactical ways to save money to laying the strategic foundation for the next generation of how IT will be delivered.

Interesting times indeed.

Comments

[Dominic Cody]

Chuck,

It does seem that people have woken up to the fact that Cloud is happening and companies are looking for Vendors who can help them on their Journey to either Private Cloud or a mixture of Public/Private.
The bid war between Dell and HP over 3Par has shown that they have relaised that they don't have a product in the Cloud space and so they wanted to get their hands on one.

Where I am the Senior IT people hate talking about Cloud and go wild when us Architects mention it but they all like the sound of what it offers just don't want to enter discussion around the overall concept.

Great post as usual by the way.

Dominic