Cloud Vendors and why Amazon should buy Sun Micro

I added one more slide to the my Walk in the Clouds presentation .



What this slide try's to do is provide a heatmap of the the possible strategy of different vendors in the cloud computing space.

Let me start with Google and Microsoft- Clearly they have a 100% overlap in their desires and they are going for the end consumers of IT - Create a platform , Provide Software Apps and Make your devices work all in the cloud. There approach might be different(i.e Google trying to enter the market via Consumers --> Small Business --> Enterprise and Microsoft going the other way round - Move their Enterprise Customers first --> Then go small business ) but they are essentially targeting top part of the IT Supply Chain.

Sun : Like always wants to be everywhere- Dont know if they really can be though. They have a software and platform strategy while also having a Baremetal and HaaS strategy. I would really question their J2ME Strategy considering that Android is probably going to kill J2ME.

HP - To me is a still the traditional big iron vendor. Focussing on Hardware and leaving it to Google , Microsoft and Amazon to fill the PaaS , SaaS stacks. Their view of the world - Be an arms supplier to the Enterprise IT Armies of the world.

Salesforce.com : Started off in the SaaS space for the Enterprise and will continue on that route. There is a strong case for Google to buy Salesforce.com when it really gets on the Enterprise IT bandwagon.

IBM : a pure play Enterprise play. They have three businesses - Big Iron(like HP) , Enterprise Software (Websphere , Db2) and Services. I think they will really focus towards the "Private cloud" model because it fits in quite well with where they want to be. An interesting thing about "Enterprise Software" Vendors like IBM and Oracle is that they not have a lock-in (from a technical standpoint) .i.e they generally adhere to standards and interoperability(which at this time is really a must to be playing in the Enterprise Software space) - their Lock-in is really in their notion of "On Stop Shop" - "Sales Process" - "Relationship Management". Dont be surprised if you start seeing a move from IBM talking about interoperability of Clouds.


Now Finally - Amazon. This has been the greatest success in this space. A wildcard entry they really realized the notion of cloud computing. But now that the market is established - what do they do next? My guess is that they either need to go up the ladder(ie compete with Google and MSFT) or go down the ladder(Compete with Sun , IBM and HP).Sticking in the middle limits their opportunity for innovation. The next set of Innovations in cloud will now either come from the orchestration of consumer facing technologies (Cell phone , PC , applications) as a continuum or it will come from basic innovation in hardware. As the economics of hardware moves from being distributed(commodity PC's) to centralized (server based ) who says that x86 and multicore will continue on its run. Also as the business model for going for the low end of the market with Ec2 is proven - It is only logical to assume that the next real innovation in data center technology will come from the big-iron vendors.

So at a Market Cap of 3 Billion Sun is dirt cheap and hence a good opprtunity for Amazon to downstream in the supplychain of Cloud computing

Comparing AppEngine , EC2 and Caroline

I gave a talk to the Los Angeles Java User group on the topic of "Comparing Google App Engine , Amazon Webservices and Project Caroline".

A lot of what I presented was really distribution of existing content and discussions. The only unique perspective that I think I added was the slide below.

The way I look at any player in the Cloud Computing space is one of the four buckets

1. Bare Metal - People and Process driven , essentially traditional style with some Hypervisor - the only service opportunity here is the traditional EDS type outsourcing that utilizes skilled labor and pooled labor.

2. HaaS - Hardware as a Service. My Definition: Programmatic Interface for Hardware Provisioning . EC2 fits in perfectly here. Moves up from BareMetal as it minimizes on "People Services" and focuses on Pooled hardware capacity and real-time provisioning of hardware. Typically billed by Clock time - offers a lot of flexibility in terms of choice of language runtimes.

3. PaaS : Platform as a Service . The issue of scaling has been abstracted out by the Platform and you have flexible services that automatically provision computing. Also refered to as Fabric . App Engine is an excellent example here. Another interesting point here is that you billing will typically move from Clock time to CPU cycle time - because there is no longer some instance you need launch.

4. SaaS : software as a service. Gmail , salesforce.com , ebay etc. You basically do not care what is happening beneath the stuff. You are the consumer of the software and expect the application to run





Here is the full Presentation.

Cloud Computing

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: ec2 appengine)

Why the Cloud Computing paradigm will enter Enterprise faster than you think?

The discussion of adoption of the cloud computing paradigm in the Enterprise generally shifts towards outsourcing of infrastructure and the associated security concerns for an Enterprise. While the outsourcing part is an important part of the story that will have significant effects on the low end of the market (Small to medium business), my take is that it will not have a big impact on the Fortune 200 Enterprise clients.

What will probably happen to the Enterprise Clients is that they will end up building their own grids for internal consumption. You will start seeing vendor offerings like Sun sell -Project Caroline, that will probably be the key differentiators for the big iron vendors. (although Project caroline will potentially be the Sun Grid offering to the Small and midsize business’s - I can very easily see a situation where Sun Sales force goes to a client like Morgan Stanley and makes a sales pitch for Solaris and its hardware based on its Project Caroline based capabilities)

So going back to my original point about why do I think a case like above will come to the Enterprise faster than you think.

Most of the Large Enterprises typically have an infrastructure group that manages its data centers. This is how the provisioning of new hardware typically works in an enterprise

Applications VP - I need to unarchive some 300 GB of data and then use it for some analytics that I need to perform at least once every month.

Infrastructure Guy - 1GB costs about X $ and 1 LPAR with 2 CPUS is about Y$ per year. You need to multiply this by 5 years to get the ROI calculation for your project.

Applications VP - Wow ! Why is the cost 1.7 times Frys.

Infrastructure Guy- Well it is all the overheads; The Company needs to pay guys like us who ensure that additional storage is installed correctly and that your group adheres to all the norms we have established

Applications VP- OK (whatever! Since I do not have any options!) , when can I get it.

Infrastructure Guy- it will take 2-4 weeks after the purchase order is approved and quote submitted.

This is how it will work when you have a Computing Cloud running internally in a large Enterprise.

Applications VP - I need to unarchive some 300 GB of data and then use it for some analytics that I need to perform at least once every month.

Infrastructure Guy - Here you go , call this API for Adding Storage and launching an instance. You will be charged by the hour

Applications VP- Cool , I am charged ½ of what you guys charged me earlier and I have the ability to turn off my meter when I do not need to computing power.

Infrastructure Guy - Yes , They have cut down on group and all my buddies who did not have scripting skills and just PowerPoint skills have been asked to go. I guess our overhead is now 1.1 X as compared to 1.7X .Besides if you consider the savings you get by switching your computing off when not needing it , we are probably cheaper than frys.

So to sum it up- the fine grained transactions between the apps group and the infrastructure group will become coarse grained via development of API's and when that happens the labour costs will go down like anything.

Cloud computing : Its not just about the infrastructure

So what is the value of Cloud Computing to me(someone who is not an infrastructure guy) ?

The important shift in my opinion is the change that will take place in the programming model for Enterprise Apps as a result of this new paradigm. The SDLC is going through a major change from Develop - Test - Deploy - Release as time/people sliced functions to Develop-Test-Deploy-Beta-develop-test-deploy-Beta2 to functions within the scope of developer responsiblities.

Imagine having your dev/test/prod environments in the cloud all driven through eclipse/netbeans and the movement between the environment's driven through course gained services like AWS webservices API that interact with your hardware to provision the application.

Imagine a library of widgets/services that will make into the Enterprise just has open source made its way in.It is really the re-birth of the Component Based Software taken to the next level.

Imagine treating things like -webscale computing , massive parallel processing- hadoop , specialized analytic capabilities , etc as commodities that can be purchased at any point of time for an application.

Imagine having a large number of small software vendors that thrive on delivering small specialized services/widgets to whom infrastructure is an operating expense and not a capital expenditure.

The above to me is the big switch. Besides the aspects of driving efficiency in infrastructure as a result of scale , the could computing paradigm will enable the building of a large number of software services players that will ultimately compete with the Application development department in the Enterprise.

Note: the link to Eric Schmidt's Bear sterns conference as an interesting observation of -"there will be small number of big players and a large numbers of small players in the cloud computing space"