Have the lack of compatibility and the difficulty of orchestrating applications and systems across platforms been holding you back from considering public cloud services? Both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors have resisted making it easy to move applications and data freely among the various public cloud offerings.
As the industry matures, it is finally poised for the next generation of cloud architectures based on innovative orchestration tools and service overlays designed to provide organizations more flexibility and more choices than ever before for building cloud applications and infrastructures.
Since the beginning, cloud services have been standalone islands with little thought or regard for the organizations' need to manage their IT portfolios across diverse platforms. It has been seen as a race to build market share, so from the vendors’ perspectives, stickiness and lock in are desirable public cloud characteristics.
No longer. Now that the winners are clearly pulling ahead of the rest of the pack, and the industry is maturing and consolidating, the rest of the cloud service providers are quickly creating tools and environments to differentiate themselves from their competition, while at the same time bowing to the reality that Amazon’s AWS has become the de facto standard.
In the latest bid to woo the so-far elusive enterprise buyers, orchestration tools are specifically designed to capitalize on the expectation that companies will be more comfortable building hybrid public/private cloud architectures. These orchestration tools and service overlays are coming from a surprisingly strong group of vendors.
Cisco announced a $1 billion investment in its global Intercloud. It is still unclear exactly what Intercloud is, but it will facilitate easier cloud migrations among diverse service offerings. HP has Helion, a service architecture that allows companies to rapidly build hybrid services on any combination of public, private, and traditional IT infrastructures, by hiding the complexity behind a single interface. Rackspace is also taking this approach as it fights to maintain its place in the cloud services market with more individualized hybrid services that are going to be attractive to enterprise heavyweights.
Some venders are taking yet another approach—creating cloud services marketplaces with many downstream partners, sort of one-stop shopping for customers. For several years Deutche Telekom has had such a service, so far only available in Europe. Verizon Cloud has been quietly building its Marketplace, a set of pre-certified, market-leading applications in big data, security, software development, and other categories, designed to help enterprise customers quickly deploy applications with lower risk.
Just when you think that cloud computing seems to be finally stabilizing into something of a standard, it looks like it is set to evolve into something else. The future of cloud services is not the capability to bring economies of scale to the masses although that was the original appeal of Amazon and Salesforce, the wildly successful pioneers of the cloud industry. The real value of cloud services is the ability to easily and quickly mix and match services to create an integrated IT portfolio uniquely suited to each organization’s needs and business objectives.
