The Role of Cloud Utilities

Last week I attended a networking event for the Nokia Cloud Symposium.  It was a solid group of folks in attendance, and featured a guest spot by Brian Jacobs, general partner at Emergence Capital.  For those who don't know, these guys invest 100% of their fund in SaaS/Cloud Computing, no exceptions.  Brian was asked to speak to the group on trends around SaaS/Cloud Computing, and one of the areas he spent a good amount of time on was what he referred to as Cloud Utilities.  These are service offerings that extend the capabilities of cloud computing providers, both known public providers like Amazon, Google, Force.com, OpSource, as well as emerging providers and large enterprises looking to marginalize their infrastructure costs much like Amazon wanted to.  He highlighted a number of examples of these cloud utilities, including SSO, security, and integration, noting that these types of offerings are not going to be core competencies of the cloud providers, yet are absolutely critical to their success, and therefore the cloud providers will need to work very closely with them.  He also pointed out that ideally these utilities should not be bound to any one cloud but instead need to traverse different environments as needed.

Obviously for us it was great to hear such a strong validation of our cloud integration strategy, but it also speaks to the evolving but ongoing need for integration.  18 months ago SaaS was talked about much more than "Cloud", however this is no longer the case.  Let's face it, Cloud, being the much broader term that it is, lets many more people participate in the movement, such as by simply installing their traditional on premise software into Amazon EC2 and calling it "Cloud".  This is both good and bad of course, as installing traditional software in EC2 doesn't solve the really important problems that true multi-tenant applications will solve, such as one code base for easier, less invasive upgrades, as well as point-and-click customization.

But regardless of how/where the application is deployed, integration remains one of the ongoing barriers to success.  While the fundamentals of the problem remain the same (avoiding silo'd applications, solving business process inefficiencies, etc.) the way in which it must be solved has changed dramatically.

Comments

[Adam Butson]

Thanks for the Post. I have heard about Cloud Computing and Had even attended the Conference which is the Cloud Computing Conference 2009 or cloudslam 2009 Its a Virtual Conference too. I got a good opportunity to meet and talk with the world's leading experts of Cloud Computing.
http://cloudslam09.com