We started 3Tera to radically ease the way IT deploys, maintains and scales – MANAGES - applications. Our AppLogic® cloud computing platform provides the foundation of our partners’ orchestration of cloud services for public and private clouds around the world. Today, we’re taking the next step in moving toward making cloud computing mainstream by joining CA.

CA and 3Tera share a common vision for the future of cloud computing, and we are excited about the opportunities that this acquisition will create for our customers, partners and their cloud users.

This is a historic moment in Cloud Computing. The significance of this acquisition is a heck of a lot more than just a land grab in a hot space. We are confident that as a team, CA and 3Tera, will extend our leadership of the cloud computing market.

We are honored, given the plethora of Cloud Computing companies that have emerged in the last few years, that CA has chosen us. We really are!

It would probably be arrogant to suggest that we, in turn, chose CA. So I won’t suggest that. But the fact is, we had many options for the future and this is the one that excited us the most.

Now, there are only two kinds of people thinking about Cloud Computing: those who believe it is the future of information technology and those who are in complete denial.

I’ve been around a long time, probably longer than most of the readers of this post. During this time, I have seen three major paradigm shifts in IT.

For my first 20 years in this game, Moore’s Law was, as it always has been, and still will be for a while, in effect. Computers became exponentially more powerful, faster and cheaper. But, for those 20 years it was big central computers doing everything.

So, the first paradigm shift was away from these big centralized systems to client server or distributed systems. There were those who had the vision that inexpensive work stations and servers, connected over a network, would take on much of the load that the big central computers were processing. And there were also those who were in denial.

The second big shift was the rise of the browser and eCommerce. Some of you may be surprised that I did not say the Internet. The fact is, though, Internet technology was around for years before there was a consumer-based Internet, deployed by the government as a way to interconnect various agencies. It was known as the ArpaNet. The browser put a friendly graphical user interface on top of it and eCommerce was born.

There were those who had a vision that the Internet would be a common way for businesses and consumers to communicate and become widely used for effecting financial transactions. And there were those who were in denial.

The third shift is Cloud Computing. Computing is pervasive. It is no longer something used and accessed by an elite few. Computing is as much a part of life as telephone, television, electricity, etc.

So, the natural evolution of computing is for it to become a utility that anyone can tap into, like other utilities, consuming only what one needs–no more, no less– but always having enough available capacity when needed.

This is Cloud Computing – the encapsulation of applications as autonomous services, abstracted from infrastructure that its users do not care about, except that it’s available and reliable when needed – services that can be available anytime, anywhere, when called upon.

There are those who believe Cloud is the future and there are those in denial.

Like distributed systems, which became pervasive when the ability to precisely manage networks of servers and work stations became available; and, like the Internet, which became pervasive when the ability to manage dynamic web sites securely with high performance; so will go Cloud Computing.

I’ve heard some compare what is going on now to the internet bubble of the ‘90s. I’ve actually heard it referred to as the Cloud bubble. The big difference between the Internet bubble and the Cloud bubble is that today’s economy doesn’t dictate the kind of crazy valuations we saw in the ‘90s (or maybe today’s economy is just more realistic than that of the Internet bubble).

But they have something very significant in common, I believe.

During the Internet bubble, everyone and his brother with a web site, from giant infrastructure companies to retailers of boutique niche products, were perceived to be the future. When the dust settled though, most couldn’t maintain their value – except for the Internet infrastructure providers, that is. It was not just anyone with an Internet presence. It was mostly those who enabled the Internet – who provided the infrastructure to deal with it – to manage it!

Just as everyone tried to stake a claim to a piece of the Internet in the ‘90s, now there are a gazillion companies with Cloud presence. When the dust settles, though, the long term value will be retained for the shareholders of the companies that provide the infrastructure, enabling capabilities and management of Cloud Computing.

CA is a management company. Their mission has always been and remains centered on the management of information technology. Their ability to adapt and manage each generation of technology has enabled them to thrive through all of these shifts.

While there are several management vendors out there, we see most figuring out how to shoehorn customers’ needs into what they already have. But tails can only wag dogs for a short period of time. The big winners will be those who adapt and evolve what they have into real, more than wannabe, Cloud Computing management.

That’s the historic statement. CA has drawn that line in the sand, and we’re thrilled to be part of it.

The leading innovator of IT management technology and the leading innovator of Cloud Computing technology are now one and the same!

I don’t know why, but I am still surprised when I hear the following question. What’s the difference between virtualization and Cloud? To me, it’s like asking the question – What’s the difference between a hammer and carpentry? The latter is a comprehensive craft. The former is one of many tools used by the craftsmen who practice it.

Simple – right? So why does that question occur at all?

It occurs, in my opinion, for two reasons, one right and one not so right.

The first reason is that all of the server virtualization vendors of any significance are also introducing Cloud offerings to the market. So, people are naturally associating the two (and rightfully so, just like one would associate hammers and carpentry). The difference is, though, no one thinks hammers and carpentry are the same thing.

So, the not so right reason – There are Cloud computing laggards out there who would like us to think that virtualization and Cloud are similar because they have embraced virtualization technology and do not want to appear out of step. As a result, there is a ton of noise in the market that is very hard to sort through.

So, how do I suggest one sorts through this noise?

When faced with a potential Cloud solution, ask a few questions about it.

Does it help me provision and deploy virtual machines on demand? If the answer is no, I’d ask why are you even looking at it? But if the answer is yes, just deploying VMs on demand does not a Cloud make.

Does it enable the encapsulation and on demand deployment of multiple VMs as a single entity? If rather than managing VMs, you want to manage frequently used “appliances” that are comprised of multiple VMs (e.g. a specific app server, a specific messaging system and a specific database server), can you do it? If the answer is yes, you are on your way to a real Cloud solution.

Does it enable the encapsulation and on demand deployment of whole software stacks (e.g. LAMP, Ruby on Rails, .NET, etc.)? If the answer is yes, you are certainly in the Cloud.

But, do you want more? Does it enable encapsulation and on demand deployment of entire multi-tiered apps? If yes, you have a very powerful Cloud solution.

More? Does it enable the encapsulation of the apps along with everything they need to run – network, storage, infrastructure, configurations, policies, documentation, etc., etc., etc.? If yes, then you have the most complete Cloud solution of all.

So, you might sense a theme here – Encapsulation. Yes. Encapsulation is key, but it is only half of the story. Encapsulation itself results in many benefits, especially operational cost savings and decreased time to market. But encapsulation alone does not make a Cloud. It does not create portability. It does not create the ability, by itself, to deploy anywhere, any time.

What’s the second half of the story? Abstraction. Not only do the most comprehensive Cloud solutions have to provide unlimited granularity of encapsulation, but they must completely abstract what is encapsulated from the physical resources (machines) they run on, so that they can run anytime, anywhere there are available idle resources.

In short, you do not measure a Cloud solution by how it does virtualization. You measure it by the granularity of its encapsulation capabilities and its ability to abstract VMs, stacks, apps/services and entire data centers from the physical resources they run on.

So, what is the future of virtualization and where is it going in 2010?

Virtualization is going the way of the hammer. It will be a necessary commodity for the Cloud, just like the hammer is a necessary commodity for the carpenter.

Now, before all the virtualization vendors get their shorts in a knot and start screaming at me that I am implying that all virtualization is the same, I am not. I acknowledge that some have features others do not, some outperform others, etc. But, can you tell who the best carpenter is only by knowing what brand of hammer he uses?

Most purveyors of Cloud Computing claim that one of its great benefits is that it can turn capital expense into operational expense.  3tera’s AppLogic Cloud Computing Without Compromise, though, reduces all expenses, both CapEx and OpEx.

AppLogic encapsulates entire applications and everything those applications need to run – code, data, OS, middleware, DBMS, infrastructure, configuration, policies, etc. -  into a single, easy to manage entity that is abstracted from the hardware.  These encapsulated applications are “superimposed” on a server farm and dynamically allocate the resources they need to run.  Therefore, specific hardware is no longer assigned to specific functions – any idle hardware can be used by any active application.  Thus, hardware becomes much more densely populated, ergo, much less hardware is needed.  This results in greatly reduced CapEx.

As such, all servers in the farm can be commodity servers all configured the same way.  So there is no need for intensive server administration.  In most enterprises and at most data center operators, one administrator can manage approximately 50 servers.  With AppLogic, because the administrators are managing application instances each of which can consume any number – up to hundreds – of servers, the applications one administrator manages can be consuming hundreds of servers, thus, increasing administration efficiency by an order of magnitude.  This results in greatly reduced OpEx.

And, as great as this is, it is only icing on the cake.  The “cake” is this.  Because applications can be run on arrays of existing commodity servers, the time it normally takes to provision and configure hardware for specific applications is virtually, pardon the pun, eliminated.   Time to market is dramatically decreased creating huge revenue opportunity.

So, the next time someone proclaims, “You get what you pay for.”, tell them when you pay up for information technology infrastructure, you don’t have to pay more to get more.  With Cloud Computing Without Compromise, you get an awful lot for what you DON’T pay for!

This one’s been eating at me since September 17 at 10:09 AM.   That was when a speaker from Tier 1 Research concluded a presentation at the 4th Annual Hosting Transportation Summit (HTS) at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas.

HTS is a great event for anyone involved in the hosting industry.  It was attended this year by about 400 people representing everything that’s anything in the U.S. hosting industry.  Attendees, for the most part, have profit and loss responsibilities and were there to find new weapons for their arsenals to increase revenues.   I love these focused conferences.  Having them in Las Vegas is really smart.  That makes it easy to gauge attendees’ interest by seeing how much of the audiences at the various sessions are lost to the casino.  The sessions at HTS were well attended!

By contrast, that week was VM World, right across the street (which in Vegas means only a 15 minute stroll) at The Venetian.  VM World was impressive – close to 15,000 attendees, I am told.  My sense walking around there, though, was that the majority of the attendees were more technology oriented – looking for cool new technology – but were not the people in their organizations responsible for P&L, who make spending decisions, and, most importantly, who make strategic business decisions.

So, what happened at 10:09 AM Las Vegas time on 9/17?  I just finished watching and listening to a very well researched and prepared presentation by a Senior Analyst at Tier 1, who organizes the event.  He very thoroughly described how the Cloud people, the compute on demand people – people like Amazon and Google, were kicking the hosting providers’ butts as they remain a commodity whose ability to compete with these Cloud giants is starting to wane.

What he didn’t do, though (and this is no criticism of him – he did his job), was talk about what the hosting providers can and should do to combat this.

So, why now?  If it’s been eating at me 7 weeks, why am I writing about it now?

Well, for the last couple of months, enterprise interest in Cloud Computing seems to have emerged in spades (pardon the Las Vegas pun).  VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and others have all made announcements readying themselves for enterprise Cloud Computing.  Our own marketing efforts have been focused around the enterprise as, though we are largely used by hosting providers and our customers are largely hosted, we have a full Cloud Computing platform that can run behind a corporate firewall, and our number of customers who do that, particularly enterprise customers, are definitely growing.

So, let’s not forget our hosting providers.  They are not only the salt of the Cloud, but they will be an integral part of Cloud Computing’s future.  In fact, as Clouds begin to interoperate globally, it will be the hosting providers who jump on that bandwagon who will fuel it with much of its resources.

Note to Hosting Providers:

If you are worried about how you are going to cope with this new competition, there is something you can do about it.  This advice might sound like an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” mentality, but it is far from it.  The mentality is more of the nature that you should join a movement that they, too, will eventually have to join.

Whatever people think, there will not be a single dominant Cloud from any of these guys.  Cloud Computing, like any other utility, will evolve into a series of Clouds that can interoperate among themselves and are connected globally.  These interoperating Clouds will be run by hosting providers, will be proprietary Clouds like EC2, AppEngine, etc. and will be corporate data centers.

So, how does a hosting provider get on board?

Hosting providers need to implement Cloud Computing platforms in their data centers (of course, I think that platform needs to be 3tera’s AppLogic – plug, plug – surprise, surprise).  They need to build product offerings on these Cloud platforms.  Once there is a critical mass of applications hosted in all of these Clouds, the leaders will start interoperating with one another as people will want to share and reuse technology components, and, more importantly, companies will want to effect business to business transactions with companies running in other Clouds.

It will be inevitable that businesses running applications in proprietary Clouds will want to have the same capabilities, and in order to do so, their Clouds are going to have to start interoperating in the same ecosystem that yours do.

And guess what.  Many of the new enterprise customers we are attracting are and are wanting to run their web applications in external Clouds - HOSTED BY YOU.  So, there’s a whole new customer base here ripe for the picking.

So, hosting providers unite.  Get on board the Cloud train and in time, and not a real long time, the Amazons, Googles, Microsofts, Akamis, Salesforces, etc, of the world will have to join you or be beaten by you!

Ken Fogarty, writing for CIO, comments on a panel on virtualization at MIT last week that included Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and VMware founder Mendel Rosenblum.

“The good news is that virtualization will become a critical part of an even larger part of most IT infrastructures as time goes on.

“The bad news is that it will do so as part of a larger movement toward cloud computing and will, in large part, disappear as a separate discipline.”

This trend started a year ago and IMHO is new happening faster than most folks expected. Perhaps this explains why so many vendors seem to need to claim they are in the cloud computing space.

This week, something quite miraculous happened.  Those of us whose vision of the future is in the Clouds have seen our crystal balls start working.

Months ago, 3tera unveiled our Cloudware architecture.  But rather than try to convince the world that there is only a single architecture that works and ours is it, we emphasized that Cloud architectures need to be open.  Not only need they interoperate with all sorts of hardware and software as virtual appliances, they need to interoperate with other Clouds and Cloud components as well.

So, what happened this week?

The two undisputed leaders in virtualization, VMWare and Citrix/Xen announced suites of products in support of Cloud Computing, vCloud and Citrix Cloud Center (C3), respectively.  Undoubtedly, Microsoft and Red Hat and more will follow.

The anticipation that drove our Cloudware architecture is proving spot on.  There will be multiple global Clouds, they will not all be the same, and the ones that will get the brass rings will be the ones that interoperate rather than stand alone.  Cloudware is designed so that it will, in the not too distant future, have the ability to incorporate elements from any Cloud.

You will note that both VMWare and Citrix, in their Cloud announcements, emphasize the need for API-based interoperability among Clouds.  3tera agrees.  The development of this interoperability will make the vision easy to accomplish.

3tera intends to take this direction to the nth degree by not only enabling applications in one Cloud to interoperate with applications in others, but to enable elements from multiple Clouds to coexist in the same application.

There’s been a lot of music to our ears this week.  The huge install bases of VMWare and Citrix are becoming part of the eco-system that we have been participating in the definition of, designed for, been building for and support - the eco-system we’ve been predicting was coming.

So, if this is music to 3tera’s ears, it’s a multi-media extravaganza that should tickle all the senses of information technology users of any size   Combining a continued direction of open Cloud Computing where anything can operate in the Cloud with this new direction of interoperability among Clouds will leave all IT users at their own mercy.  Vendors will have less ability to manipulate and dictate what hardware you run your applications on, what operating systems you use, what software you deploy, what type of infrastructure components you rely on, what databases you use and where your applications run - and in how many places.  This will ALL be up to you and you’ll be able to change it all at YOUR will with just your little old browser.

A lot of people ask me - How are you going to get big enterprises to accept Cloud Computing?  How are you going to get over the concerns around security and privacy?

Well, as I said in an earlier post, many enterprises will be running Clouds behind their firewalls, in their own data centers.  But what about external Clouds?

Hmmmm.  Is Cloud Computing really just a trendy term?  Or are we onto something here?

When something is in a cloud, it is shrouded in secrecy.  You can’t see it.  You can only imagine what it is, if it is there at all.

At 3tera, we believe the optimal Cloud exists in multipal data centers, geographically dispersed.  This adds to the question, “What is in the Cloud?” another question sort of - “What Cloud is it in?”.

Lets imagine that all the clouds in the sky are somehow connected (at the molecular level, they most probably are).  Each of these Clouds are made up of millions upon millions of water droplets.  Now imagine if you had to find a single particular water droplet in the sky and you had no idea what cloud it was in.  Now, add to that, the ability of that water droplet to move from one cloud to another.  Do you think you could find it?

So, I maintain that concerns about Cloud Computing privacy and security become very overstated when dealing with Clouds in multiple locations.  In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that running stuff in those kind of Clouds is far more private and secure than running the same stuff in traditional data center environments.

Imagine a sophisiticated hacker who wants to attack the First National Bank.  Imagine that First National runs all of its applications in two data centers.  All the hacker needs to do is penetrate one or both of those data centers.  Once inside, he can monitor First National’s transactions indefinitely and methodically plot what type of transactions to spuriously submit and when to submit them.

Now imagine if First National’s applications run in multiple data centers worldwide, and each application did not necessarily always run in the same data center.  What would the hacker do?  I suppose he might accept that challenge, but if he was really out to get a bank, he’d move on to Second National.

You know, statistically, homes with burglar alarms get robbed much less often than homes without them.  Of course this is due to the fact they they are more secure.  But it is also due to the fact that a burglar will look for an easier target and not even try.

The same is true for Cloud Computing, if the Cloud is done right.  At 3tera, we like to say that Cloud Computing is not a substitute for good architecture.  But if the Cloud is architected like the sky - multiple sub-clouds interconnected, that IS good architecture.  “Sky Computing” is private and secure!!!

Finally, there’s a practical side to all this.

External Clouds will be operated by companies whose business is data center operations, not companies whose business is financial services, pharma, health care, manufacturing, etc.  These companies, to remain competitive, will constantly update their data centers with the latest technologies.  These technologies assuredly include those that keep data private and secure.

So, to all of you early adopters of Cloud Computing, I say, “Bravo!”.  By being brave you are achieving world class security and privacy for your precious information technology assets, without incurring huge data center capital expense.

Your applications and data can be naked sitting ducks, or moving targets in flak jackets.  The choice is yours.

Congratulations to Albert Wu and his team at SilkFair on their recent mention in the Wall Street Journal. Albert contacted 3tera shortly after we came out of beta, and have been using AppLogic for well over a year through our hosting partners. He also had the distinction of being the first user to ever publicly post about his experience with AppLogic.

I’ve had the pleasure of talking with Albert a few times about business and technology. He’s a heck of an entrepreneur so it’s exciting to see him succeed and to be able to be small part of SikFair’s ongoing success.

There have been multiple white papers and articles written by analysts - Is Cloud Computing Ready for the Enterprise?  The question is asked so many times now - Is Cloud Computing ready for the enterprise?  So, I have to ask - Is the enterprise ready for Cloud Computing?

I’ll start this discourse with a few PC and sincere comments (the two are not mutually exclusive unless one is running for political office).

First, I love Corporate CIOs and IT managers (not in a romantic way, of course, but with great admiration).

Second, they have the most difficult jobs in the corporate universe.  They are the brains and the central nervous systems of large enterprises.  They are also the most taken for granted of all executives.  They represent cost centers who get no credit for their corporations’ profits, while keeping the corporation alive.  If they achieve 99.99% availability of their services, an iota of kudos is given for that 99.99%, but a mountain of wrath is doled out for the other 0.01%.

Finally, I spent 27 of my 37 year career in information technology as an enterprise IT manager and Fortune 500 CIO.  You guys and gals are my comrades.

So, why do I feel the need to put my comrades on a pedestal?  Well, it started with some comments I made at a Wall Street conference and variations of it that I made to members of the technical press and analyst community.  I used the following analogy.

If you woke up in the morning and read in the Wall Street Journal that an eCommerce company like Overstock.com had stopped using the USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. to deliver their goods and, instead, leased airport hubs all over the world, bought a fleet of jets and bought thousands of trucks and started delivering the stuff themselves, you’d think they were out of their minds.  So, why is is not equally insane for financial services companies, health care institutions, manufacturing companies, bio-tech companies, pharmaceutical giants, etc. to be spending a billion dollars or much  more each year on information technology infrastructure?

Well, that analogy has prompted several to accuse me of thinking that corporations are insane and corporate IT managers and CIOs are stupid.  I assure you that it not the case.

Then what do I do?  I really put my foot in my mouth.  I title this treatise “Are Enterprises Ready for Cloud Computing?”, as if to arrogantly proclaim that we are ready but enterprises are not.

But there is expiation for that as well (and I am not running for office, so this is a thought embellishment rather than flip flop).

Intellectually, of course you are ready.  Of course you have the experience and skill to adopt Cloud Computing.  And most of you have the resources.  Most significantly, you have always risen to the occasion when disruptive technologies have been thrust upon you.

But, practically speaking, whether you, I or anyone thinks that the future holds a world where all enterprises will get computing on demand and only pay for what they consume, we know that this will not happen over night.  I do see a world, though, in six or seven years, where this will be very much the norm and corporations owning data centers will be the exception to the rule.

So, here’s where the Darwinian Theory of the Corporate Data center comes to play.

I have said many times that Cloud Computing is the most disruptive technology that has come along in a very long time.  Respected technology analysts say it will be bigger than e-Business and it’s potentially a quarter of a trillion dollar market (that’s almost enough to fund a fraction of a war!).  So, people ask me - Do you think Cloud Computing is a revolution or an evolution?

My answer is a resounding “Both”.

I believe that all evolutionary change starts with revolutionary change.  In Darwin’s Origin of the Species evolutionary changes start with a mutation.  Those mutations are the revolutions that result in evolution.  In most cases the mutation comes about as a mechanism to heighten the chance of survival - you know, to make the species more fit.  Subsequent to those revolutions, the evolutionary process gradually occurs as the most fit survive and the mutation becomes the norm - the standard.

Cloud computing is the mutation - the revolution.  Enterprise IT and Corporate CIOs/IT Managers will jump on the opportunity to evolve as they always have when revolutionary technology mutations have occurred.

So, here’s an example of a scenario of how the evolution will happen.

During the next couple of years two things will occur.

First, enterprises know that the hardest things to plan for with regard to capacity, performance, etc., are on line applications offered on the web.  They really have no control over who may log on, how many may log on, when they may log on, what they may do once they log on, etc.  So, the natural evolutionary step to mitigate this is to run those applications on massively scalable infrastructure that scales up and down dynamically as needed, using resources on demand, always there when needed and only paying for what is consumed.  These infrastructures are what we are now calling Clouds.

At the same time, the mission critical data and systems of records that are the enterprise life blood residing in their data centers need to be isolated from these on line applicatons exposed to every internet user.  This will be accomplished through the use of secure virtual gateways in the Cloud, connecting, in a loosely coupled manner, rather than a fully integrated manner, to the enterprise data centers, their databases and systems of record.

These gateways will take many forms.  They may be SOA gateways using XML and virtual XML firewalls, virtual messaging systems such as MQ, virtual EAI appliances or customized appliances encapsulating organizations’ proprietary techniques for reliably and securely communicating among systems (and anything new that comes along to supplement or replace these things).

Second, infrastructure/architecture agnostic Cloud platforms (what we at 3tera call Cloud Computing Without Compromise) will be installed in enterprise data centers.  There will be two factors that will drive this.

(1) As more and more applications are offered on line, those same applications will often be used internally by the enterprise employees.  Why incur the cost of having separate experiences for employees and customers who are accessing the same information and functionality.  Also, when connecting the on line applications in the Cloud to the data center and SORs, having them on similar platforms will make it seamless and efficient.  ‘

(2) A Cloud infrastructure done right, behind the corporate firewall, enables the enterprise to run their data centers as metered utilities.  It enables them to more efficiently use their hardware resources by provisioning what is needed for each application on demand and releasing those resources when no longer needed for other applications to use.  It enables them to more efficiently use intellectual capital by shifting IT administrators from managing machines to managing applications.  And, most importantly, it greatly decreases time to market because the lengthy provisioning, configuring, etc., of hardware and infrastructure resources is, pardon the pun, virtually eliminated.  So albeit humongously significant, forget all the talk about cost reduction and avoidance.  Cloud Computing in the enterprise has the potential to greatly increase revenue and beat the heck out of competitors implementing like products using traditional data center deployment methods.

OK - so what’s the next step in the evolution?

At the same time that enterprises are growing comfy with applicatons in Clouds and realizing the upside of dynamic provisioning and scaling, they will be developing new applications and replacing/changing existing ones.  They will start building the new applications in Clouds and as they change existing applications, will consider migrating them to the Cloud in the process.  This will afford them the advantages of much faster times to market, the ability to run applications on demand in multiple data centers (globally if appropriate) creating their first truly complete disaster recovery abilities and concentrate on their core businesses which may be financial services, health care, manufacturing, etc., but certainly is not data center operations (they will leave that to the companies whose core business IS data center operations).

Now the final step (well, as my limited vision can see it - of course there will be much more beyond this):

Enterprises will find themselves with data centers that only contain data.  Finally, a data center will be what its name implies.  All of their functionality - all the non-data tiers of their services, will be in Clouds connected to the data centers’ data.  At that point, evolution will have to start behaving like the data center is an appendage.  Over time, the corporate data will move to the Cloud just as many smaller businesses without data centers are using storage services in Clouds today.  The corporate data center will be a vestige, and eventually evolution will cause it to disappear.

Discussion of this step always raises questions of privacy and security.  I maintain that when corporate data is in the Cloud it will actually be more protected than it is in the enterprise data center.  But I’ll save that for a separate, devoted future posting.

In short, the corporate data center is not a stupid useless entity.  There have been no alternatives.  My hat is off to the brave men and women who devote their careers to thanklessly operating them.  They are profound necessities.  But neccesity truly is the mother of invention, and the corporate data center, with all of its overhead, has bred Cloud Computing.

So, as I started this with a PC comment, I feel like ending it with one.  As I composed this, I did realize that there are many people out there that discount Darwinian evolution in favor of Creationism.  I assure you that I have the utmost respect for all beliefs, no matter how different from my own.  And my references to evolution here, obviously have to do with the evolution of technology, not of the human race.  Furthermore, I am very happy to depict the corporate data center as the eventual dinosaur with a saddle on it’s back being ridden by a member of the Cloud Computing species.

We (other members of the 3tera team and I) had the pleasure of talking to John Foley this week. John is writing for InformationWeek and is focusing on Cloud Computing. This is a knowledgeable guy who has thoroughly researched the space.

During the chat, something very important dawned on me. This space is getting noisier and noisier – rightfully so – Cloud Computing is hotter than Hades and better than sliced bread! And we are making it even noisier with our semantics.

People do not define terms in this space consistently. I think it’s ironic that the semantics of Cloud Computing are, er, uh …, well, cloudy.

I’ll paraphrase:

IW – You talk about internal Clouds behind firewalls. How can a Cloud be private and internal?

3tera – We think of Cloud Computing in terms of how, not where?

IW – I disagree. Cloud Computing is running on IT infrastructure that you don’t own – someone else is the datacenter operator.

3tera – Maybe this is just semantics. We could call private Clouds “internal utilities” instead of private “Clouds”. If an enterprise were to run an app in an external Cloud and wants to connect that to their systems of record in their own datacenters, they might want to consider the same platform in their data centers.”

…. and so on.

After wrangling about that for several minutes, the subject changed. All we accomplished though was an addition to the confusion.

The epiphany for me during that conversation is that whatever I call Cloud Computing and whatever someone else calls Cloud Computing is kind of irrelevant. A couple of years from now, someone will obsolete the term Cloud Computing with something more trendy and we’ll debate what THAT is.

For me, the future holds computing services on demand – Information Technology as a Service – MASSIVELY scalable IT as a Service. ITaaS – the sound of that tickles my funny bone. ITaaS will use the Internet and, I think, intranets as well. End users will need no regard for the underlying technologies that support their services. They will only need to know that the services are available and perform at any scale on demand.

If someone installs a generator in their home instead of using the power utility, they get electricity on demand, the same as if they plug into a public utility.

I concede though, at face value, the economics of Cloud Computing seem to favor Clouds as external entities. After all, the hallmark of anything on demand is that you only pay for what you consume. External Clouds can accomplish this by making the same hardware available, at different times, to different users, thus, eliminating idle time and getting the most bang for the buck. But looking deeper, the economics favor internal, private Clouds as well. If a data center manager wants to be provisioned only for average usage rather than peak usage, he/she can do that if he/she is on a Cloud infrastructure that can grab resources from external Clouds only occasionally, when needed. If you add to that, with a Cloud done right, the data center manager manages applications rather than servers, decreasing administration costs; and, time to market is greatly reduced due to the lack of need for tedious provisioning, configuring, etc., the economics of the private Cloud become quite compelling.

To me, the bottom line is this. This is the 21^st century. It has been almost forty years since a man walked on the moon. For most of those forty years, almost all businesses have relied to some degree on Information Technology. It’s about time that IT is available on demand – really on demand – and everyone can have access to world class technology, only paying for what they consume.

So, call it Cloud, call it Utility, call it Platform as a Service, call it ITaas, call it whatever you want to call it. But please, don’t call me late to dinner … and, pretty please, don’t call me late to the on demand computing revolution!