Soundbyte City
I'm doing my darndest to use all the great information I gathered for my upcoming VMware profile. For example, Gartner VP Thomas Bittman had some interesting things to say about conservative users and private clouds.
According to him, users are seeking an "evolutionary" approach to the cloud--not a dramatic, big switch. "They want the ability to move in a very gradual manner, and to only move workloads they feel are ready for the cloud," he states. "They would like to move to the cloud in a hybrid model. That means if I want to use Google Apps engine, can I use that on premises? No I can't. What about Amazon? Well maybe with some help from middleware like Eucalyptus I can do that, but it's still a little hard. VMware makes it easy, so it gives them a gradual onramp to cloud computing that allows them to evolve at their own pace. That's very important, and that's where VMware has the best story right now."
Bittman also says according to Gartner's metrics, 75 percent of larger companies are pursuing a private cloud computing strategy, and roughly the same number say they are going to spend more on private cloud than public cloud over the next three years. "Private cloud, there's a lot of hype there," he says. "There's a lot of misunderstanding about what the term really means, and whether it's just virtualizing, or shared service, or if it's really creating a cloud-like infrastructure. But the enterprise interest is there, and VMware is set up to be the standard bearer in that market."
My favorite Bittman quote comes in response to a question about VMware's ecosystem being a major strength for the company. Bittman's reply: "Well, they're not the easiest company to work with, they aren't leaving a lot of space for partners, but it's a comet that everybody wants to ride."
He also discusses the importance of privacy and security to cloud users, saying "That's all they really care about."
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 07/08/2010 at 12:48 PM