TORONTO – We’ve got public clouds and private clouds, and somewhere in the middle we’ve got hybrid clouds. And at a customer event this week in Toronto, virtualization vendor VMware (NYSE: VMW) outlined its vision for the future of cloud computing: clouds optimized to meet the needs of specific industry verticals.
Speaking to attendees at the Toronto stop of the company’s VMware Forum event, chief marketing officer Rick Jackson said companies need an IT infrastructure that works beyond the four walls of the data centre. They need to be able to seamlessly connect into a public cloud as needed, but also port back applications easily. There can be no one-way streets, said Jackson.
“Cloud computing should start from within your own infrastructure,” said Jackson. “Cloud computing isn’t a destination; it’s an approach to computing.”
VMware believes in an “inside-out” approach to cloud computing, starting with the data centre and building-out to public cloud providers and vertical-specific clouds.
“We don’t believe even in the cloud arena that one size fits all,” said Jackson. “We’ll see more specialized public clouds that cater to specific regulatory and market requirements. We believe this is the direction the market is going.”
That view was echoed by Al Gillen, program vice-president, system software with IDC Corp. Gillen said different customer segments, such as small or big business, and different verticals all have specific and unique needs that will be catered to by cloud providers in different ways.
“We’re going to have a real diversity of cloud offerings; the world won’t boil down to three main cloud vendors,” said Gillen. “Five years from now we’ll have a huge number of cloud service providers with specific offerings catering to specific verticals.”
In an interview with CDN, VMware’s Jackson said most customers in the future will draw on a network of clouds, leveraged from several service providers, but managed from their perspective as if it were a single cloud.
“Today, with SaaS, companies don’t get all their applications from one single vendor. It’s a natural extension,” said Jackson. “Some may be generic cloud providers, but some will take that offering and specialize based on specific regulatory needs, adding services that make sense for that industry.
An example of this is already in place at the New York Stock Exchange, which has built a specialized cloud infrastructure for its financial trading network. Clients are moving specific financial applications that would benefit from the specialized environment into this cloud, while keeping less specialized applications in-house or in more generic cloud environments.
It comes down to the type of applications one is running, said Jackson. A vertically-specialized cloud is going to be more expensive than a generic cloud, so only applications that would benefit from that specialized environment should be moved there. The channel partner as trusted advisor will have a role to play helping customers make those choices.
“For SMBs, partners will be helping to develop strategy and in many cases offering managed services for cloud-based deployments,” said Jackson. “Many partners are moving in the direction of offering their own managed services or services on top of someone else’s cloud.”
The Canadian market has lagged a bit as native cloud providers ramped-up capacity, and many are just coming to market this year with full-service offerings said Grant Aitken, area vice-president, Canada with VMware.
“We’ll start to see movement in the later half of 2011, but the majority of workloads will continue to live in private data centres for the foreseeable future,” said Aitken. “The vast majority of Canadian companies are on the path to virtualization, and will continue to a maturity model that includes private clouds.”
Things are still in the exploratory stage agrees Harry Zarek, president of Richmond Hill, Ont.-based solution provider and VMware partner Compugen Inc . The initial cloud model was a horizontal generic infrastructure, but he doesn’t see that model having a lot of legs.
“Our customers are looking for something relatively low-risk, not risking critical business applications, but where they can get a measurable return and identify business benefits,” said Zarek. “Applications that have some use in a vertical market is, to me, a new way of looking at it.”
When he talks to business leaders though, he said they do say it’s not about the infrastructure. It’s about the applications, and what the applications enable for the business.
“Can I get access to the business applications I need in a better defined cost model,” is what customers want to know, said Zarek. “It’s still very much in the ‘try’ point, trying to evaluate the value of those types of models.”
Follow Jeff Jedras on Twitter: @JeffJedrasCDN.
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