Cloud Computing Expo on Ulitzer
"With cloud computing, price to deploy applications goes through the floor while flexibility to scale those applications goes through the ceiling!" says WaveMaker CEO Chris Keene, in this lively round-up of CEO and CTO opinions to get a sense of The State of Cloud Computing compiled and published by Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo is taking place this week at the Santa Clara Convention Center (November 2-4, 2009).
Keene's take on what's driving Cloud Computing enterprise-wise is just one of several high-profile contributions. Those contributing to Geelan's impromptu survey include: RightScale CEO Michael Crandell; the Chairman & CEO of WaveMaker, Chris Keene; the CTO of GigaSpaces, Nati Shalom; Lew Cirne, Founder & CEO of New Relic; Mitchell Kertzman of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners; and the Chief Technology Officer of CSC, Bill Koff.
QUESTION #1: What in your view are the Top Two drivers of the adoption of Cloud Computing?
NATI SHALOM, GigaSpaces
1. Business agility – the ability to deploy new applications quickly
2. Efficiency – the ability to run application more effectively and reduce cost as a result of that (Note that I'm not referring on reducing cost at a machine level)
MICHAEL CRANDELL, RightScale
1. Business agility
2. Cost reduction.
BILL KOFF, CSC
1. Economics & Business Value
2. Speed
CHRIS KEENE, WaveMaker
The top drivers are price and flexibility. With cloud computing, price to deploy applications goes through the floor while flexibility to scale those applications goes through the ceiling!
LEW CIRNE, New Relic
1. By far the top driver is speed: speed to procure and provision infrastrcture, platforms and applications. We see business demanding IT solutions in days, and traditional IT often can't respond faster than in months. For example, an application development team in the business unit might need a server immediately to run a load test. The central IT team - burdened as they are with shrinking budgets and increased demands on their time - may respond with something like say "please fill out a form and we'll procure that server for you and provision it. It should be ready in 4-6 weeks." Unable to wait that long, the team gets a cloud-based instance running on EC2 in 10 minutes.
2. The second driver is financial. Enterprise IT organizations are tired of buying more hardware and software than they need with large cash outlays up front. The days of shelfware are almost over, and everybody benefits from that - except perhaps the shelfware vendor.
QUESTION #2: What is the biggest category of user currently using the Cloud?
BILL KOFF
Web email users
CHRIS KEENE
Consumer-facing web sites
MICHAEL CRANDELL
Wide variety from SMB to Enterprise today. Biggest category is "forward thinking."
QUESTION #3: Which in your view are the Top Five Companies in the Cloud as at late Fall 2009?
NATI SHALOM
• Amazon
• VMware
• GoGrid
• Rackspace
• Citrix
MICHAEL CRANDELL
• Amazon
• Rackspace
• VMware
• Eucalyptus
• RightScale ;-)
CHRIS KEENE
There is more smoke than light in the cloud debate these days. My vote for the top 5 cloud companies includes the four companies that make up the IBM Cloud Quick Start Program - Amazon, IBM, RightScale WaveMaker - and Eucalyptus, which makes moves the private cloud from dream to reality.
LEWIS CIRNE
"I think the top players in cloud are those names you'd expect (Amazon, Rackspace, Salesforce, etc.) but the more interesting question is this: What are the top five companies that are having their world turned upside down because of the cloud? Historically, enterprise software companies have built out their business by taking heavyweight software 'solutions' to market with a large, expensive direct sales force.
This has been very expensive, and the customer has borne the burden of that cost. Now, enterprises are adopting cloud solutions because of their instant access and pay-only-for-what you use benefits, and this drives a totally different delivery model for the vendor. As the cloud totally changes go-to-market and deployment models for software vendors, the firms that are locked into the historical direct models will have significant challenges adapting to this new world order. So I think SAP, IBM Software Group, Oracle (despite Larry's rhetoric), HP and CA will all have a very tough time changing their business models to provide viable cloud solutions for their customers."
QUESTION #4: Who is NOT currently using the Cloud, who maybe ought to be?
BILL KOFF
Enterprise users
LEWIS CIRNE
Many financial services firms - while they are certainly looking at cloud and will no doubt adopt it in due course, are for good reason very concerned about the security questions related to adopting cloud infrastructure, especially public cloud infrastructure. I think those security issues will get addressed over time, but there will be certain classes of applications that will always make sense to run on dedicated hardware in a private data center.
MICHAEL CRANDELL
Anyone who has not begun an effort to move the 40% of apps that are "low hanging fruit" -- i.e. not highly security sensitive, transient demand, could benefit from quick deployment.
NATI SHALOM
Deploying mission critical application, Deploying performance or latency sensitive applications, Deploying Complex applications (with lots of ties to the organization)
QUESTION #5: In which sector of IT do you think Cloud Computing will make its impact most noticeably in 2010?
MICHAEL CRANDELL
Enterprise
BILL KOFF
Infrastructure: Storage
CHRIS KEENE
Bringing web development and deployment to the masses through visual, easy-to use cloud development platforms.
LEWIS CIRNE
We see a lot of interest in government agencies for private clouds to dramatically reduce their IT infrastructure costs and improve agility. (When's the last time you heard "Government" and "Agility" in the same sentence?)
QUESTION #6: What is the killer app for cloud computing?
CHRIS KEENE
Ecosystem is the killer app for cloud computing. Integrating solutions from multiple vendors to create a best of breed solution is what the cloud does best. In the cloud, ecosystems are easier to create, both from a business and technical point of view. They are also much more transparent, as the results of their efforts are available for the whole world to see. Two good examples include the Cloud Quick Start program with IBM, Amazon, RightScale and WaveMaker, as well as the ecosystem for cloud business intelligence launched a little over a month ago featuring Jaspersoft, RightScale, Talend and Vertica.
Does Cloud Computing Exist as a Separate Industry Sector?
The last word goes not to any of the executives above but to the Sage of San Francisco, Mitchell Kertzman - Managing Director of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.
"I actually have a somewhat contrarian view," says Kertzman. " My view is that (although we at Hummer Winblad have invested in several 'cloud computing' companies), there really is no specific 'cloud computing' sector."
Here is Kertzman's logic:
"I think that the lines between SaaS, PaaS, etc., virtualization and cloud computing are fuzzy and indistinct. To some extent, cloud is an overlay on virtualization, allowing dynamic elasticity for provisioning and deprovisioning, but that doesn’t make it a separate sector. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of that and I think that it will be the future of corporate IT, but your questions are a bit hard to answer given my views above!"
It would be a bold man who would bet against Kertzman's view becoming the consensual industry view over time. His record of prescience, which we have had the honor of showcasing time and again here at SYS-CON.com, is astonishing - he identified Virtualization as a major game-changer before anyone else in the industry.
Participants:
Chris Keene - CEO, WaveMaker
Christopher Keene is Chairman and CEO of WaveMaker (formerly ActiveGrid). Chris was the founder, in 1991, of Persistence Software, a San Mateo, CA-based company that created a new approach for managing data in high-transaction banking and communications systems. Persistence Software investors included Cisco, Intel, Reuters and Sun Microsystems. The company went public in 1999 on the NASDAQ exchange and was sold in 2004 to Progress software.
Lewis Cirne - Founder & CEO of New Relic
Lew Cirne is the founder of New Relic, the first provider of on-demand (SaaS) application management tools for cloud or datacenter applications. A seasoned entrepreneur, technologist, and enterprise software pioneer, he has been focused on application performance management for more than ten years. Cirne holds seven patents related to application performance technology. Most recently he was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital. He founded and was first CEO of Wily Technology and earlier held senior engineering positions at Apple and Hummingbird Communications.
Nati Shalom - CTO of GigaSpaces
Nati Shalom is CTO and Founder of GigaSpaces. He is also the Head of the Israeli Grid consortium. He has more then 10 years of experience with distributed technology and architecture namely CORBA, Jini, J2EE, Grid and SOA. As a technology visionary he's a frequent presenter at industry conferences and actively involved in evangelizing Space Based Architecture and Data Grid patterns.
Bill Koff, CTO of CSC
Bill Koff is a leader in CSC’s technology community as vice president and chief technology officer for CSC’s Office of Innovation, which includes the Leading Edge Forum. The LEF provides clients with access to a powerful knowledge base and a global n
Michael Crandell - CEO of RightScaleMichael Crandell is the CEO and a founder of RightScale, where he provides the vision and direction for the company as it pioneers innovative ways to bring the power of cloud computing to any organization. Crandell is a frequent speaker at cloud computing industry conferences, and he has played a major role in helping establish and promote openness and transparency in the cloud market. Prior to RightScale, he served as CEO at several Internet Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) companies and as executive vice president at eFax.com.
Mitchell Kertzman - Managing Director, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
Mitchell Kertzman is a Managing Director at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. He has over 30 years of experience as a CEO of public and private software companies. Most recently, Mitchell was Chairman and CEO of Liberate Technologies, a provider of platform software for the delivery of digital services by cable television companies. Before joining Liberate, he was chairman of the board and CEO of Sybase, Inc. Mitchell was founder and CEO of Powersoft, which merged with Sybase in February 1995.