Competition for the Cloud Heats Up

Clouds

Image by karindalziel via Flickr

Cloud no longer a single vendor game. For years cloud computing has been synonymous with Amazon whose Amazon Web Services really created and defined the space. In the past year other providers have matured and in some areas even surpassing Amazon.

In a conversation with Scott White, the VP of Sales from Rackspace, he related to me their approach on the cloud and how customers are utilizing their cloud offering. Their current growth rate is pretty staggering. It’s a magnitude higher than their managed hosting offering. Rackspace somewhat trepidatiously entered the cloud market. It did so with Mosso, a subsidy of Rackspace that operated for two years under a separate brand, seemingly to distance the initiative from the Rackspace name in the event it was a failure. It succeeded and has been rebranded as the Rackspace Cloud. What is interesting about this offering is, in part thanks to their background and existing infrastructure, they provide hybrid computing offerings. Where all on the same subnet you can have some nodes utilizing their traditional managed hosting offering where other nodes are in the cloud elastically growing to meet demand.

The lack of cloud computing standards has lead to a vendor-lock. Every cloud vendor has proprietary cloud. OpenServer is the bold initiative by Rackspace to change that. Rackspace has always been about service as their competitive advantage. Figuring they (and everyone else) couldn’t compete with the lead amazon has, they turned the tables by open sourcing their technology and defining standards along with a group of other cloud providers to form OpenServer.

Also entering the field are many of the tech giants including HP, who has really invested in their cloud offering with their Instant On service. VMware bringing their decades of virtualization experience to their offering. IBM is all in, competing on the Paas, SaaS and IaaS fronts. Rounding out the compelling offerings are GoGrid, Cloud.com and Joyent.

While not Cloud in the Amazon sense, Microsoft and Google are both providing cloud like services. Microsoft is in the ring with Azure, their Windows Platform as a service offering. Google offers Google Apps and AppEngine as offerings in the SaaS and PaaS markets.

Words and Ideas are my own. This post is sponsored by Enterprise CIO Forum and HP
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  • Anonymous

    Given out-sized market forecasts, you knew just about every IT vendor would get into the cloud business in one way or another. You are a bit generous with crediting Amazon for creating and defining the cloud space. Amazon created the cloud by credit card. http://www.enterprisecioforum.com/en/blogs/jdodge/cloud-credit-card-it-too-easy

    Here’s what Answers.com says about the cloud’s origins:”There is no sole inventor, it is a business model that utilizes many of the existing modern models, such as the internet, all in addition have no sole, proprietary inventor. Cloud Computing is considered to be an internet-based computing model. The ideology of outsourcing computer hardware has existed even since the 1960s, with John McCarthy who theorized of an eventual computing outsource model.”
    Alas, there is no reference to the cloud in McCarthy’s Wiki, but time-sharing and selling computing like water and electricity is mentioned. Regardless, McCarthy’s bio is interesting….http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_(computer_scientist)    

    • Anonymous

      Thanks for your comment.

      The point I’m making here isn’t that everyone is on board, but that for the first time there exists viable options to amazon’s dominance. A few of the other offerings have matured to the point where they are ready for serious contention. 

      I agree that nobody can claim to have invented the cloud. Even Amazon’s AWS offering is built on top of the shoulders of giants including linux and xen. What I will give Amazon credit for is building the first successful commercial cloud computing platform and in doing so defining the market. 

      Before AWS, nobody talked about cloud computing. Sure they have talked about virtualization and network platform offerings, but the Cloud has been defined by Amazon who pioneered the space. Just like the PC became synonymous with Microsoft and Social Networking synonymous with Facebook even though they weren’t the first player in the space, they were the first to succeed at scale and defined a new market. 

      Thank you for adding this background and sharing the links. McCarthy was a visionary man whose ideas are just coming into reality today.

  • http://www.facebook.com/calento Paul Calento

    Organizations may be unlikely or unable to standardize on one cloud vendor (even in IaaS / PaaS categories) due to the pragmatic decision to use the cloud. While many senior IT managers debate the applicability of the cloud, their subordinates, as well as line-of-business, are contracting cloud services.

    What’s most important today is meeting the immediate needs of the business, not the technology itself. Once several projects are deployed, the next step will be tying everything together. While the latter is most important to the vendors providing the solutions (i.e. the big opportunity), the former is most important to customers. That’s where a flexible, inclusive architecture may come into play (one example: HP Instant-On Enterprise). For most companies, vendor consolidation will occur as their experience with the cloud matures.

    Start with a use case/business need. Work with vendor partner(s) to craft a solution. If it involves the cloud, go cloud. It may or may not. Set simple goals. Expand accordingly.

    –Paul Calento(note: I work on projects sponsored by Enterprise CIO Forum  and HP)

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