This post originally appeared on chucksblog.emc.com and is reprinted with permission.

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.

By James Urquhart, August, 22, 2010

This blog was reposted from the “Wisdom of the Clouds” website.

It is fascinating the ways in which the world of computing can be made easier, thus creating opportunity for new complexities–usually in the form of new computing technologies. It’s happened with programming languages, software architectures, computer networks, data center design, and systems virtualization. However, nothing has raised the bar on that concept like IT automation.

You may have been expecting to hear the term “cloud computing,” but cloud is just an outcome of good automation. It’s an operations model–a business model to some–that was only made possible by a standardization of the core elements of computing and the automation of their operation. Without automation, the cloud cannot be self-service, and it cannot scale to very large numbers of customers or systems.

The best part is that we are only at an intermediate stage in the evolution of operations automation–the second of several evolutionary stages in the growing capability of systems to fend for themselves in a global computing marketplace.

These are the stages we understand to some extent today:

1. Server provisioning automation–The first stage of automation that we all know and love is the automation of server provisioning and deployment, typically through scripting, boot-time provisioning (e.g. PXE booting), and the like.When the server is the unit of deployment, server automation makes a lot of sense. Each server (bare metal box or virtual machine) can host one operating system, so laying down that OS and picking the applications to include in the image is the way to simplify the operation of a single server.The catch is that this method alone is difficult to do well at large scales, as it still requires the system administrator to make decisions on behalf of the application. How many servers should I deploy now? Which types of servers should I add instances to in order to meet new loads, and when should I do that? The result is still a very manual operations environment, and most organizations at this stage attempt capacity planning and build for expected peak. If they are wrong…oh, well.
2. Application deployment automation–A significant upgrade to single server deployment is the deployment of a “partitioned” distributed application, where the different executables and data sets of the application are “predestined” for a deployment location, and the automation simply makes sure each piece gets where it needs to go, and is configured correctly.This is what Forte Software’s 4GL tools did when deploying a distributed application, which transferred responsibility for application deployment from systems administrators to developers. However, this method requires manual capacity management, deploying for peak loads, and continued monitoring by human operators.
3. Programmed application operations automation–Developing operations code adds critical functions to basic distributed deployment automation to automatically adjust capacity consumption based on application needs in real time. This is the magic “elasticity” automation that so many are excited about in the current cloud computing landscape. Basic scaling automation makes sure you pay only for what you use.However, today’s scaling automation has one severe limitation: the way the “health” of the application is determined has to be engineered into application operations systems ahead of time. What conditions you monitor, what state requires an adjustment to scale, and what components of the application you scale in response has to be determined by the developer well before the application is deployed.
4. Self-configuring application operations automation–To me, the logical next step is to start leveraging the smarts of behavior learning algorithms to enable cloud systems to receive a wide variety of monitoring data, pick through that data to determine “normal” and “abnormal” behaviors and to determine appropriate ways to react to any abnormalities. These types of learned behavior turn the application system into more of an adaptive system, which gets better and better at making the right choices the longer the application is in production.Though behavioral learning systems today, such as Netuitive’s performance management products, are focused primarily on monitoring and raising alerts for abnormal behaviors, they can do some amazing things. According to CEO Nicola Sanna, Netuitive has three key calculations it applies to incoming data:
   1. It determines where one should be with respect to operations history.
   2. It performs end-to-end contextual analysis of existing conditions, determining what factors may be contributing to an operational abnormality.
   3. It forecasts likely conditions in the near future based on previous behavior trends, thus potentially averting abnormalities before they happen.

There are other products making their way into this space, such as Integrion’s Alive product, and I expect we’ll see performance analytics become more intelligent in a variety of other traditional management and monitoring tools as well. The real excitement, however, will come as automation systems learn not only when to raise an alert but also what action to take when an alert is raised.

This latter problem is a difficult one, make no mistake (a wrong choice might teach the system something, but it might also be detrimental to operations), but successful implementations will be incredibly valuable as they will constantly evolve tactics for dealing with application performance, security (at least some aspects, anyway) and cost management.

Crazy, you say? Why the heck would I want to give up control over the stability and operations of my key applications to a “mindless” automation system? For the same reason that–once you trust them–you will happily turn over your operating systems to virtual machines; your phone systems to managed service providers or your elastic workloads to cloud environments: optimization, agility, and cost.

The companies that adopt one or more cloud models for a large percentage of their workloads will see some key advantages over those that don’t. Cloud providers that adopt the best infrastructure and service automation systems will greatly improve their chances in the market place, as well.

In the future, companies and providers that go further and apply learning algorithms to operations automation will increase their advantage even further. We just need a few smart people to solve some hard problems so we can teach our cloud applications to fend for themselves.

Learn more

Chuck Hollis

This post originally appeared on chucksblog.emc.com and is reprinted with permission.

Sometimes I write the blog post, sometimes it gets written for me.

Wanted to offer you all a quick link to a drive-by interview I did with Steven Burke at CRN yesterday.  He threw some great questions at me — hopefully my answers hold up.

You be the judge — here.  I also got this unrelated pickup here at ZDnet.

Almost all large companies and many small and midsized enterprises are virtualizing. Based on surveys, the majority of large companies consider building a private cloud a core strategy. Surprisingly, that’s even true with midsized organizations – but slow down a bit. While the direction makes sense, be careful about getting too caught up in the hype of building a perfect private cloud. A cloud service requires a self-service (or non-manual) interface, and some form of usage metering, or even chargeback. Behind the interface, the services are delivered automatically on demand.

The fact is, not every IT organization needs a fully self-service interface, and many smaller organizations see no value in usage metering. They simply want to deliver services faster. For them, a 70% private cloud is absolutely good enough.

There is still value in virtualizing your resources, automating how the resources are allocated to meet demand, automating provisioning based on standard service offerings in a published service catalog. But you may want a person in the middle of the process. Or you may want to route the pure self-service requirements to your favorite external cloud provider rather than build your own. And that’s OK. It all comes down to business requirements, return on investment, and future strategy (including the potential to evolve to external cloud providers in the future). How far you go is your decision.

So while most enterprises may consider private cloud their goal, and vendor hype is going to skyrocket on how to reach that goal – my bet is that most organizations will find that a less than pure private cloud is going to be good enough.

Read more

This post originally appeared on chucksblog.emc.com and is reprinted with permission.

So, I’ve been in front of lots of customers since the VCE Coalition announcement, and a lot of them focus primarily on the Vblock itself.

I thought I’d share the questions I’m getting — and how I’m answering them.

Note: in addition to customer/partner focused questions, there’s been a whole lot of snarky sniping from various competitors and others who may have a different agenda.  All part of the fun. I’ll try and cover their concerns later, but — for now — we’ll focus on the people who pay the bills!

#1 — Why Did You All Do This?

Most every decent-sized IT organization wants to get to the benefits of large-scale virtualization as quickly as possible.  We decided to take the very best technologies from all three companies, and package it up as a “virtualization appliance” to not only speed deployment, but overall improve results.

Think of it as a new option to consider: do things as you’ve always done them, or consider a new deployment and operational model via Vblock.

One of the challenges associated with private clouds is that three important things usually have to change at the same time to get the maximum benefit — the technology model, the operational model and the consumption model.  A Vblock is intended to accelerate all three.

#2 — What If I Want To Use Other Vendor’s Technologies?

Feel free.  As always, people are certainly welcome to choose individual technologies and integrate them in such a way that they see fit.  VMware’s products works with most everyone, Cisco’s products works with most everyone’s and EMC’s offerings do the same.

However, these mix-and-match combinations aren’t Vblocks, they’re more like traditional IT approaches to building infrastructure.  At the same time, each of the three vendors are more than willing to sell you the individual components you’ll likely need if you’re taking the traditional approach.

#3 — The Vblocks Seem Really Big, Why?

If you look at, for example, at a Vblock type 2 supporting ~6000 VMs, you may wonder — who the heck needs that?

Well, we work with a few customers who are already in that territory, both large enterprises and service providers.  However, if one imagines what happens when virtual desktops catch on, ~6000 VMs can be consumed in a hurry.

Besides, if you can makes something work well at significant scale, the benefits trickle down to more modest environments.

#4 — How Do I Manage A Vblock?

We *strongly recommend* (but do not insist) that people consider EMC Ionix UIM (unified infrastructure manager) as the element manager for the Vblock.  A major part of the value proposition is tied to the next-gen operational model, and you need an integrated element manager to achieve this, and today, there’s only one to seriously go consider.

#5 — What Do We Use A Vblock For?

Basically, anything that you want to do with VMware at scale.

For some people, it’s traditional workloads at scale — Exchange, Oracle, SAP, et. al.  For other people, it’s a platform for the new stuff — virtual desktops, app dev and test, or self-service computing.

#6 — Can I Integrate A Vblock In With My Existing Servers, Storage, Fabric, etc. ?

Yes and no.  Part of the idea behind a Vblock is the proverbial “clean sheet of paper”, in exchange for which it delivers an eye-opening difference in capex and opex.  Taking that end-to-end value proposition, disassembling it, and forcing it to integrate backwards seriously dilutes the value proposition.  Certainly, it can be done (it’s open technology, after all) but you probably won’t be entirely happy with the results.

The primary exception is management.  Although we recommend UIM (above), it in turn plugs nicely into existing enterprise management frameworks you might be using today, such as BMC, Tivoli et. al.

#7 — All The Competitors Are Calling This Closed, Proprietary, Risky, Evil, Etc.

Yes, they are saying that stuff, aren’t they?

At a practical level, all of the component technologies (server, fabric, hypervisor, storage, management) are no more open or closed than they were before Vblock.  Yes, it’s true you can’t build a Vblock with anything you choose, but that’s sort of understood.  And if you want to build your own Vblock equivalent from this set of technologies, or some other combination, that’s always been an option — fully supported by each vendor individually.

Risky?  I’d offer it’s no more or less risky than the component technologies and their ability to integrate and interact at scale.  Again, we’re talking VMware, Cisco and EMC products.

The other thing we hear is “where is best-in-breed?”.  We agree, that’s important.

Our collective position is that — for this particular use case — these are best-in-breed technologies, pre-assembled, pre-characterized, with integrated management and security, supported as a whole.

#8 — How Do The Software Vendors Feel About This?

Basically, no differently than they feel about VMware in general.

Some vendors, like SAP, are “all in” and very enthusiastic.  Other vendors (Microsoft, IBM) take a more balanced approach that they need to support what customers want to do on the infrastructure side, but would prefer to sell the entire stack.  One vendor in particular (Oracle) has clear ambitions around their own stack, and takes a very dim view.

Interesting to note — a common request we’re getting is to configure a V2P capability (virtual to physical), so that if a given software vendor gets cranky about replicating a specific problem in a physical environment, that can be automated.  Although we don’t expect that to be used very much.

#9 — What About Software Vendor Pricing?

Unfortunately, the members of the VCE coalition can only control the pricing of the products that we collectively sell.  There’s still a *ton* of software products out there that are decidedly unfriendly to the implied variable consumption models associated with private clouds.

We’ll all have to work through that one together.

#10 — How Do I Get Started?

That’s rather straightforward — tell us about the use case you have in mind for a Vblock, and that starts the discussion.

Maybe it’s virtual desktops, or self-service computing, or business analytics, or app dev and test, or your SAP landscape, or maybe something else entirely.  Telling us “how big” (in terms of VMs) would be useful as well.

Next, decide whether you’d like your own team to do the installation, migration and operation, or whether you’d like that done for you, perhaps with a little help.

Then we’re into the details: specific proposals, pricing, scheduling, etc.

And A Final Note

You’d be surprised at just how many people we’re talking to are interested in #10!

Cloud computing providers have a difficult marketing challenge, in my opinion. Think about it–no matter what service model or deployment model a provider is delivering, they must differentiate their service while meeting the “commodity” needs of as many customers as possible. It would seem these businesses are stuck between providing least common denominator service capabilities and being accused of intentional customer lock-in.

From a customer perspective, it is equally challenging when one is “looking for servers and storage” and must choose between a bunch of services that essentially run Linux or Windows and store your files. How does one choose? How do the cloud providers set themselves apart in the customers’ eyes?

Unfortunately, I’ve been inundated of late by an increasing number of cloud service announcements that lack any sense of differentiation. Hosting providers are announcing “on-demand server capacity billed on a pay-as-you-go basis.” Platform vendors are simply announcing what language they support, and how much they charge for services. Software-as-a-Service vendors have the easiest job to differentiate service, as they can do so based on functionality alone if they wish, but even there some vendors struggle to differentiate themselves by anything other than the fact they run as a cloud service.

This has to change. Forrester’s James Staten is telling us that clients are getting “cloud weary.” I believe a lot of this has to do with the ridiculousness of “cloudwashing” that we’ve seen for some products and services, and the relative monotony of pitches for things are arguably cloud services, especially in the IaaS space.

Below is a list of five key categories of competitive differentiation for cloud computing. It is not a complete list, nor do I think all vendors would look at this question in the same way. However, if you are looking to acquire cloud services, these are the elements I think you start with as you evaluate any service, be it SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS. If you are selling these services, consider this an outline for your next requirements document.

1. Ease of operations. Yeah, I could have kept things simple and just said “ease of use,” but “use” in the cloud computing service sense is much more than how humans interact with the system. For instance, how does a company with hundreds of applications in the cloud strewn across a dozen or more vendors monitor and manage those applications to manageable service levels?

And yes, phenomenal user interfaces will set some providers apart from others, but it will be the “behind the scenes” interfaces–such as APIs, publish and subscribe event streams, transparency and auditability systems, etc.–that will make the most significant differences between providers.

Will many of the aspects of “ease of operations” be standardized? Sure. The Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) is an example of an attempt to deal with a large part of this challenge. However, differentiation will still be possible through extensions, quality of features and–yes–some custom interfaces.

1. Configurability. One of the things about today’s best-known cloud computing environments is that they are essentially infrastructure and software architecture frameworks that dictate a lot about the application architectures that can be built on them. For example, the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows each server to be on one widely shared network. No separation of management traffic from DMZ traffic here (at least not explicitly from the point of view of the OS).

No, application architects are instead forced to consider how they would build and operate their application in the infrastructure architecture given them. Good books have been written with this in mind, but ultimately the complexity of the problems we wish to solve with information technology will dictate the amount of configurability we require from our infrastructure systems–even if they are delivered as a service by a third party.

The low-hanging fruit here for IaaS vendors are things like network architectures, data storage options, server options and so on. Also useful here are services that enhance the infrastructure, like security systems, message queueing, and storage tiering.

1. Performance. One public relations contact I got recently was quite interesting. A hosting company sent me an email indicating that they have an increasing number of customers coming to them from AWS, and finding that their applications actually perform better in the former than the latter. I haven’t confirmed the truth of that claim, but it is an interesting claim nonetheless.

Processing speed, memory speed, storage access, read and write speeds, latency, bandwidth–these are all things that are tunable by the cloud provider, either through technology acquisition, or through superior engineering and operations expertise. And, as with servers and storage, the fastest speeds per dollar spent will generally win.

I would not be surprised if we saw a cloud performance war, similar to the RDBMS benchmark wars, especially in the IaaS category (though it would make sense in the PaaS and SaaS categories as well).

1. Reliability and security. I debated combining these two elements, as they represent different aspects of the same concept. However, that core concept–risk mitigation–is at the heart of so much of the decision over whether public cloud services are better than private data centers, that I think they will often be viewed through the same lens.

Companies will need time to demonstrate differentiation in both of these categories, but features can be introduced today to increase the transparency of both operations and security in any provider. Redundant distributed data stores, “early warning” DDoS detection events, auditability APIs; these are all features that would “open the kimono” in a controlled fashion and increase customer’s ability to trust that their provider has made the protection and availability of their data and functionality a core competency.

1. Customer service. After I wrote my closing post for the “big rethink” series, Kevin Magee, COO of ZeroTouch IT, wrote a post in which he noted several additional predictions for the effect of cloud computing on IT. Most notably, he pointed out that cloud will change “[h]ow Vendor Relationship Management will become a key discipline in IT organizations.” Amen, brother, and I completely agree.

In a tongue-in-cheek post from early 2008, I noted that system administrators should “get good at waiting on hold for customer service representatives.” In reality, there is truth to that, but the providers have a lot of room to craft that experience.

One thing they can do is advance the technical leading edge in terms of customer self-service and operations transparency. (Hmm. Has anyone else noted how often ‘transparancy’ comes up in this discussion.) I noted some ideas about this in a previous post. Smart providers will find others.

Cloud computing is one of those truly disruptive market opportunities that makes or breaks companies. The winners will find ways to differntiate. Those that don’t almost certainly can’t win. So, please, no more press releases that fail to differentiate in any meaningful way.

I sat on an industry panel for a Goldman Sachs investor conference today focused on next gen IT and cloud.

Although we were supposed to be covering investment themes in the hardware sector as the industry industry transitions, I ended up (as usual) probably going too far afield.

Now, as I reflect on the session, I realize that were likely some important macro themes worth sharing and discussing.  See what you think?

Trouble From The Outset

As with any panel, it usually starts with an ostensibly easy question that sets the stage for everyone in the room, i.e. what’s going on?

I keep coming back to Simon Wardley’s comparison of cloud computing to the industrial revolution.  There’s more to that analogy than meets the eye.  Fits nicely with Nicholas Carr’s views in the Big Switch.

We’ve begun to witness the industrialization of IT.

Simply put — this is no minor industry transition.  How we build, operate and consume IT will likely be forever changed in a handful of years.  Everyone will be affected.

As with any industry transition, there are winners and losers.  And, of course, given the audience, they were intensely interested in investment themes to consider.

In-The-Stack vs. Best-Of-Breed

I was on stage with two other storage vendors, and I wasted no time jumping into the deep end with the controversial observation that the industry was quickly consolidating into “stacks” — legacy ones such as HP and IBM, newer ones such as VCE as well the potential for an Oracle/Sun stack.

As I write this, the news on Twitter is that HP is buying 3Com for $2.7 billion in cash.  The drumbeat of consolidation and stack-building continues.  The real surprise is — why is anyone surprised?

I offered that technology players in a popular stack would have an inherent business model advantage in terms of scope, scale, integration and efficiency.  As the industry consolidated, more of the spend would move to stacks, and less to traditional best-of-breed piece parts vendors that supplied one subsystem or the other.

The two storage vendors on stage offered up a vigorous rebuttal (all part of the fun) by saying that the only way for IT organizations, system integrators and service providers could differentiate themselves going forward was  by selecting and integrating the best of breed technology, ostensibly with their product.

I countered by observing that any best-of-breed player — no matter how good — faced structural challenges in their business model in the very near future — going to market costs, convincing customers to break up their chosen stacks, costs associated with integrating and supporting all the major stacks, getting a fair return on their R+D investments, and so on.

At some point, it becomes more about the best power plant (to use Nick Carr’s analogy) and less about who makes the best rotor, bearings, etc.

It’s All About Service Providers

Very quickly, the discussion turned to service providers and their new role going forward.  I described them as a new and important “channel” of distribution between companies that build technology, and organizations that will consume it.

There will be some service providers who carve out an area of vertical or application expertise as their competitive advantage (Salesforce.com comes to mind).  These outfits will want many of the same things that any large-scale IT organization wants.

More interesting is the newer wave of “horizontal” service providers: telcos, outsourcers, etc. who are very good at standing up IT infrastructure at scale, and running it extremely efficiently.

However, very few of these newer large-scale players have a way to reach IT organizations effectively.  Most enterprise IT organizations want a “high touch” relationship with their vendors, especially when considering something relatively new.

For a service provider that’s focused on being cost-advantaged, that’s a business model problem, since building such an organization is an expensive proposition.  Better to sell your cost-advantaged service through someone else who already has a customer relationship, e.g. a big enterprise IT vendor or their partners.

Put it all together, I said that the likely winners in this next phase of IT would be the players who could put together not only a compelling stack, but a compelling go-to-market ecosystem to take it to market.

And Then It Got Back To Storage

No surprise, EMC always gets put on panels with other storage vendors.  So, sooner or later, I knew we’d be talking about storage.  The other two panelists were very focused on storage implications of the new cloud models.

Both did an admirable job of driving their talking points home — how well positioned their unique technology was, how many service providers were using their products, and so on.

Always the controversial one, I suggested that we were in the very early phases of this industry transition, and to claim leadership or victory was a bit like Netscape declaring that they had won the browser wars many years ago.

Given that one fellow panelist represented a file-system-based storage product (NetApp), and the other fellow panelist represented a block storage product (3Par), I went for the “none of the above” ground by suggesting that object-based storage might be the winner at the end of the day.

Which got us into a very interesting discussion indeed.

Consider The Next Wave Of Enterprise Applications

Given that I probably hadn’t stirred up enough controversy, I started to bring out some heavy ammunition.

Consider, for example, that an enterprise application created with modern tools can ideally be thought of as potentially “cloud ready”.  These applications may not think in terms of blocks, files, or even databases.

Indeed, much of the legacy storage, operating system and database technology being fiercely debated today may not be all that relevant after 3 to 5 years of application rewrites in these newer frameworks.

That gave everyone some food for thought

Questions From The Audience

One expected question was around concentration of buyers and resultant loss of pricing power.  As the theory goes, if there are fewer large-scale IT buyers going forward, doesn’t this mean that IT vendors lose pricing power?

As if we as vendors had any to begin with …

I presented an alternative scenario — selling and supporting a smaller number of larger consumers of IT is inherently more efficient from a business model perspective.  And any vendor with a considerable R+D budget now has a clear use case target to create relevant differentiation that tends to get magnified at scale.

Someone else tagged into the ever-perennial “isn’t IT getting commoditized?” question.  I always like to take a crack at this one.

First, if you look at the last 40 years of IT, the cost-per-unit of IT has come down spectacularly.  And, at the same time, our economy ends up spending more and more on IT every year — economic hiccups excluded.  Why would that change in the future?

Second, if you agree the premise that we’re seeing the industrialization of IT, there are plenty of opportunities for smart players to capitalize on the shift in a big way.

And Then Our Time Was Up

I don’t know whether the discussion was what the organizers were expecting or not.  We went far outside our brief in terms of topics discussed.

Sorry about that, folks.

I’ll be interested to find out whether or not the audience thought it was a good discussion, or not.