Cloud Connection 02/15/2012. A personal view

Four Things I'd Like To See At Cloud Connect  says Charles Babcock in his Information Week article.
He wants (1) with no human tinkering any virtual cloud can exchange files with other virtual clouds. (2) universal units of measure for cloud pricing, something like a "Kilowatt of cloud" (3) performance monitoring universal and "a la carte" and on demand (4) the ability to move at wish in a jiffy to another cloud or availability zone.
Nati Shalom
Isn't this asking too much from Cloud Connect? Mr. Babcock has an impossible dream, It will never happen, because it is NOT a goal for a technology, but standards, politics and competitiveness,  At Cloud Connect, everyone labels their software -whatever that may be -  as cloud. My visiting experiences fall in a few categories.

The large companies (IBM, CISCO, Microsoft) have impressive large booths, but it appears no one knows what they sell and why.  They are men and women smiling and polite. These are actual replies:  "I am so sorry, I just started last week and I was told to attend the show". Or " I am a lifetime company man, never been outside and I don't know"
Ruv Cohen

Then we have the storage and back up companies. Or monitoring software companies. Or anti-virus companies. Or security solutions software. They may have a good products, but they can go to any data center show and sell the same products. They are useful add-ons  not solutions by themselves




Randy Bias
There are real cloud companies. - IaaS providers, private cloud software. - have good products.  Yet some of them confuse the poor visitor with their claims they are the best, with a mixture of slogans and technical blah-blah. Personally I think they are too many small companies fighting access, at least now, to too few reluctant and skeptical corporate buyers. Many startup cloud sales executives, are drifting from company to company, because they can not make a living from a few sales per year


Bernard Golden
I like practical dreamers, like Steve Jobs, who changed the way we think product management and entrepreneurship. . They are the ones who distort reality to make new breakthroughs real.  Perhaps my disappointment at Cloud Connect is that I met very few people who dare. The show was dominated by me-too-ers. The Enterprise IT companies, they say want to sell and make money from sales. They know the traditional, legacy IT will give them business for years. They are Data Center providers of routine tools that lock in their customers This has nothing to do with cloud, it has to do with filling in cracks and holding hands for their customers' new employees replacing the one who left for better jobs elsewhere.. .

Geva Perry
"To be like Google? Like Facebook?" said one of them? after listening to my question.  "Yes" , I said "or like Apple". He was from Texas,  and  made me feel  as if I was an extraterrestrial .

As I was going to have a drink, I realized that all this cloud movement, would not have had existed without people, my friends, who are on my twitter list named "Fascinating People"  Randy Bias (CloudScale founder), Bernard Golden, Geva Perry, Nati Shalom (GigaSpaces), Adrian Cockcroft (Netflix), Ruv Cohen (who was sailing the Caribbean after he sold his company to Virtustream)

Many people I credit as part of the cloud soul were not there. The Spanish entrepreneurs Diego Marino (Abiquo), Diego Parilla (StackOps) and Javier Perez-Grifo (TAPP). My apologies to those not named.
Jason Hoffman

Jason Hoffman ( Joyent) did not attend.  And talking about Joyent, they are probably closer to the ideal of Charles Babcock than any other company I know

What I did miss at Cloud Connect was to see network virtualization companies, like Nicira, Evolven  and so on. We know more than half of the cost of the cloud are network. Well, we know because of various articles published analyzing cost of the cloud .
Adrian Cockcroft

What I discovered at Cloud Connect is a company called Cloud Cruiser. They operated in stealth until March last year. According to web site:
Cloud Cruiser delivers a comprehensive suite of applications to map and measure resource usage independent of computing environment, allocating costs based on IT-defined criteria, and providing flexible and in-depth reporting of that usage. Cloud Cruiser enables business intelligence from many different levels and perspectives to give you the optimization and chargeback information that you require for your cloud.


Comments

Andy Robert said…
Great post, as you show the real cloud integration companies. - IaaS providers, private cloud software. - have good products.But http://www.informaticacloud.com is also a cloud integration company
Informatica, say hi to Juan Soto

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