VMWorld 2009

In our video blog with Ron Oglesby yesterday, one of his thoughts was that our customers could really use a “Roadmap” for how to approach getting to the cloud. I agreed that this would certainly help cut through the confusion. I think one of the main problems is that vendors have jumped on the hype. Even if their product has really nothing to do with the cloud somehow it does in their marketing. This situation leads to incredible confusion in the marketplace.

Going back to my blogs from earlier this week, the “Cloud” in the end should be about providing access to applications independent of device and location. So, why do the majority of vendor offerings being provided today not fit this definition. The answer is that to support this a paradigm shift in development is required. New ways to support development always take a very long time to implement but vendors want to take advantage of the hype now. It is much easier though to provide Hardware as a Service (HaaS) so these are the services that are being offered and used now while SaaS offerings are much slower to hit the market.

So, if you are an IT strategist what should you be doing and thinking about to be ready to benefit from “Cloud Computing” as the technologies and services mature. I think all of the following will be important:

1. In the long run the IT organization will have to function as a service provider. This is normally a major shift in IT governance changing a significant number of policies, processes and technologies within the organization. There are normally many maturity levels associated with the path to become a service provider. In terms of infrastructure it’s a great start to first be able to allocate and track costs at a very granular level. You don’t need to start immediately with charging directly for services but you can provide significant cost transparency back to management and the user community. The costs should be associated with defined services and service levels so that the clients understand what they are getting and where the costs come from. As your organization matures in this you can change to actually define and offer services to your internal clients. These services can mostly be provisioned internally but you could also offer some external services if it makes sense. All the time you will be maturing in terms of policy, process and culture to eventually provide IT as a service.
2. Instrument to track SLA metrics. If in the future you will charge for services and service levels you must learn how to track and report on them. This takes a significant amount of time to learn and implement but it is well worth the effort.
3. Stay up to date with VMware software. Migrate to vSphere for all the major benefits but also to stay current and enable the future benefit of portability between the public and private clouds.
4. Look for software that will enable you to build service catalog with automation and self service, integrated problem and incident management, log management, capacity management and forecasting and of course financial management. All required to effectively run a services organization.
5. Be open minded with regards to what is out there now. It might be possible that using one of the existing “Cloud” vendors to supply HaaS for Test/QA environments could save you money and using these services now will provide experience that will help as the model matures. It may also make sense to start to use some of the SaaS based services. This will also provide experience for moving to a service centric model in the future.
6. Discuss a strategy of developing for the cloud. I think it might be best to start with internal clouds for this moving to external as they mature. I kind of like the VMware strategy with Spring because it does not tie you in to a particular vendor even though it may be optimized on vClouds. It also supports several popular languages including java and Rails. This is probably one of the most important aspects of the plan because it takes a long time to have software that will take advantage of the new paradigm.

I am sure there are other prep steps I haven’t mentioned. A good take-away from this blog would be that Cloud Technologies are in very early stages of development. Its great for the Industry that so much innovation is being driven because VMware and others are hyping up Cloud Computing. I think its not just marketing hype and its also not just another try as ASP. I think the vision is driven by real issues and complexities within IT caused by the development of complex client server technologies that are hard to manage especially with regards to recovery, disaster recovery, performance and cost containment. But it will take some time to realize the benefits associated with “Cloud Computing” which is a good thing because it gives you and your organization time to prepare.

- Rob Zylowski Director, Services and Director, IP GlassHouse Technologies