I attended an interesting presentation last week hosted by EuroCloud UK [disclosure: of which I'm chair] about the business case for public cloud. The two main speakers both made some interesting points that speak to the interplay between public cloud and private variations thereof, as enterprises move to incorporate cloud computing into their IT infrastructures.
First up was Simon Wardley, lately of Ubuntu distributor Canonical and now in a new job with CSC's industry thinktank, the Leading Edge Forum. Always an interesting speaker, Simon ran through his trademark bravura performance of 100+ slides in ten minutes, ranging from kittens toting handguns to erudite historical trend charts.
His message was unequivocal: "It's not a question of if, it's a question of when you're going to use cloud, and of balancing the risk." He explained cloud as the natural consequence of an inevitable commoditisation of IT infrastructure. There's no longer any strategic advantage for most companies in customizing activities such as payroll and HR (nor in automating the underlying virtualized computing infrastructure of data centers in their own proprietary way, he might have added). The cost and efficiency benefits of using shared third-party service provider infrastructure outweighs any proprietary advantage, provided the accompanying risks are understood and costed in.
But that doesn't mean organizations will spend less on their IT, nor will it result in green benefits, with less energy consumed, he added. "On one side you're going to get efficency, on the other side you're going to get a massive increase in consumption." Although it'll take less energy and cost to do what we always have done, new things that were never before economic will become affordable and will take up the slack, increasing usage overall.
Next up was Tony Lucas, founder of Flexiant, a former hoster-turned-cloud-provider, which is now building a software stack for cloud providers, offering a framework for hosting providers to offer a cloud stack and an application marketplace. Flexiant has been founded on the assumption that there will be many public and semi-public clouds serving many different niches.
I think that's a viable assumption, even though it goes against the conventional wisdom that public cloud is a one-size-fits-all proposition served by mega-providers like Amazon and Google. People want the benefits of public cloud, but they want it tailored to their specific needs and there's a broad spectrum to be satisfied. That creates an opportunity for niche cloud providers, especially if they're able to bring together portfolios of cloud applications that meet a vertical or specialist market need — a model that Flexiant specifically supports.
Meanwhile, others remain to be convinced of the benefits of public cloud for the whole of their infrastructure. They're looking to hedge their bets by using public cloud infrastructure that's interoperable with private infrastructure they may choose to host in-house. VMWare's recent joint announcements with first Salesforce.com and then Google are designed to appeal to this emerging market.
Overall, it means that public cloud is widening its appeal by reinventing itself to meet a more varied range of customer needs. That can only be a good thing both for cloud providers and the customers they serve.
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