How big is the opportunity for cloud computing? A question asked at pretty well every IT conference these days. Whatever the number, it's a big one. Let's break down the opportunity by the numbers available today.

By 2011 Merrill Lynch says the cloud computing market will reach $160 billion.

The number of physical servers in the World today: 50 million.

By 2013, approximately 60 percent of server workloads will be virtualized

By 2013 10 percent of the total number of physical servers sold will be virtualized with an average of 10 VM's per physical server sold.

At 10 VM's per physical host that means about 80-100 million virtual machines are being created per year or 273,972 per day or 11,375 per hour.

50 percent of the 8 million servers sold every year end up in data centers, according to a BusinessWeek report

The data centers of the dot-com era consumed 1 or 2 megawatts. Today data center facilities require 20 megawatts are common, - 10 times as much as a decade ago.

Google currently controls 2% of all servers or about 1 million servers with it saying it plans to have upwards of 10 million servers ( 107 machines) in the next 10 years.

98% of the market is controlled by everyone else.

Hosting / Data center providers by top 5 regions around the world: 33,157

Top 5 break down
USA: 23,656
Canada: 2,740
United Kingdom: 2,660
Germany: 2,371
Netherlands: 1,730.

According to IDC, the market for private enterprise "Cloud servers will grow from an $8.4 billion opportunity in 2010, representing over 600,000 units, to a $12.6 billion market in 2014, with over 1.3 million units.

Market opporunity based purly on server count. $160 billion dollars divided by 50 million servers = $3,200 per server.

The amount of digital information increased by 73 percent in 2008 to an estimated 487 billion gigabytes, according to IDC.

World Population 2009: 6,767,805,208
Internet Users 2000: 360,985,492
Internet Users 2009: 1,802,330,457
Overall Internet User Growth: 399.3%
Fastest Growth Markets (Last 10 years) - Africa +1,809.8%, Middle East, +1,675%, Latin America +934.5%, Asia +568.8%
Slowest Growth Markets - North America +140.1%

Cloud value by world population: $23.64 per person
Cloud value by Global Internet population: $88.77 per person

-- Update --
Netcraft Finds 365,000 Web Sites on EC2

June 4th 2010
IBM says The Cloud cuts IT labor costs by up to 50%, improves capital utilization by 75%

July 1st 2010
IDC estimates that sales of public cloud services will grow at a 25 percent annual clip. The annual growth rate for typical IT projects, conversely, is 5 percent.

July 26 - 2010
SaaS Revenue to Grow Five Times Faster Than Traditional Packaged Software Through 2014, IDC Finds

• By 2012, IDC expects that less than 15% of net-new software firms coming to market will ship a packaged product (on CD). By 2014, about 34% of all new business software purchases will be consumed via SaaS, and SaaS delivery will constitute about 14.5% of worldwide software spending across all primary markets.
  
  
• By 2012, nearly 85% of net-new software firms coming to market will be built around SaaS service composition and delivery; by 2014, about 65% of new products from established ISVs will be delivered as SaaS services.
  
  
• SaaS-derived revenue will account for nearly 26% of net new growth in the software market in 2014.
  
  
• Traditional packaged software and perpetual license revenue are in decline and IDC predicts that a software industry shift toward subscription models will result in a nearly $7 billion decline in worldwide license revenue in 2010. As a result, a permanent change in software licensing regime will occur.
  
  
• SaaS segment mix will shift toward infrastructure and application development and deployment/PaaS, and away from U.S. dominance. IDC expects that by 2014, applications will account for just over half of market revenue. This shift will happen in part as a result of increasing IT cloud spending by enterprise IT groups and commercial cloud services providers (cloud SPs) relative to end-user spending

-- Conclusions --

Based on these numbers, a few things are clear. First server virtualization has lowered the capital expenditure required for deploying applications, but the operational costs have gone up significantly more than the capital cost savings making the operational long tail the costliest part of running servers.

Although Google controls 2 percent of the global supply of servers, the remaining 98 percent is where the real opportunities are both in private enterprise data centers as well as in 40,000+ public hosting companies.

This year 80-100 million virtual machine will be created, the traditional management approaches to infrastructure will break. Infrastructure automation is becoming a central part of any model data center. Providing infrastructure as a service will not be a nice to have but will be a requirement. Hosters, Enterprises and small business will need to start running existing servers in a cloud context or face in-efficiency which may limit potential growth.

Surging demand for data and information creation will force a migration to both public and private clouds specially in emerging markets such as Africa and Latin America.

Lastly, there is a tonne of money to be made.
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It's the age old question in IT, the question of whether or not to build it yourself or just buy it off the shelf. Lately, I seem to be hearing the questions again and again. It seems that for some reason some IT guys have gotten it into their head that if they adopt a cloud infrastructure platform, either hosted or in house, they're going to lose their jobs. So the only choice is to build it. I think the reasoning is if you build it, you will control it, and your company will have no choice but to keep you around. Unfortunately the answer isn't so cut and dry.

The rationale for building it yourself has been around as long as IT. There have always been various reasons for it, from there weren't any systems that could delivery what we needed, or we're different, we're smarter, we're bigger.. you get the point.

The real question you need to ask yourself is where does youe strengths as an organization lay? As a software developer or selling some other core business? For most it's the latter. Building your own cloud software is fraught with risk. One such example is a major hosting firm who spent 16 months building their own cloud IaaS platform only to realize that the assumptions they made about the potential cloud market opportunity had changed and their platform couldn't deliver the technical requirements of their new customer reality. More to the point, their platform wasn't what their targeted customers wanted to buy. Compounding their problem was the platform they built themselves didn't actually work - period. The key system engineer left mid-way through the project, forcing the company to find a replacement as well as inducing a major delay in the development. Additionally poor documentation meant those replacements had no practical way to continue what had been started previously. Needless to say, several million dollars later the project did launch, only to be promptly replaced a by a turn key IaaS platform.

Then there is the question of service differentiation to which I say, if you choose an extensible cloud platform, then you're able to differentiate faster than you could if you build it yourself. Business is about adapting to market conditions. Building it yourself mean longer development cycles and potentially less adaptability. Customizing an existing platform, one that provides you a template for success and best practices is inherently less risky or time consuming. The real question you should be asking is can I deploy this cloud platform in a way that allows my business to be unique? If the answer is no, than find a platform that can. If you still can't find one, then build it yourself. But be prepared that you should now consider yourself a software developer.

As the founder of a IaaS platform vendor, I freely admit I am bias toward buying a platform over building it yourself. My reasoning is simple, our business is building IaaS platforms for service providers. Is it yours? If you answered no, my comment is unless you plan to get into the software business, building it yourself will only serve to add un-need risk, uncertainty and potential failure to your IT operations. Something I think we can all agree you should avoid.
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With all the talk and the hype surrounding cloud computing many seem to be missing a major factor -- both in terms of the growth potential as well as the current opportunity for cloud computing products and services. Although the tech media and analysts love to tell you the cloud is everything including a $160 billion plus opportunity, like it or not, Cloud Computing is still an emerging niche market and exists only as part of a much larger market segment. And I'm here to tell you that as soon as you start embracing this fact, the sooner you will start to capitalize on the opportunity.

Regardless of your industry or market segment, every single product or service that is sold today can be defined by its market niche. Of course there are the products aimed at wider demographic audiences otherwise known as mainstream niches. But those markets tend to take years or even decades to mature. As an example think of the broader web hosting industry compared to that of the shared hosting, VPS, CDN, or the managed / dedicated server markets. Those companies that arguably have had the most success in each of these markets focused on winning in their particular niches. Rackspace within managed hosting sector or Akamai in the CDN space. Both can be considered as part of the broader hosting markets, but both have significant differentiation and more importantly success with in their particular niches. Both have also been able to charge signifcantly more than the previous generations of services within the broader hosting market.

Also being first in market doesn't necessarily mean you're going to own it. When looking at niche markets it's interesting point out that narrower demographics (PaaS, SaaS or IaaS in contrast to VPS hosting) lead to elevated prices due to the concept called the price elasticity of demand. (Which is a good thing) In other words, a niche market is a highly specialized market that allows you to survive among the competition from numerous much larger and broader focused competitors.

As a further example think of Amazon (the book version of course) versus your local community corner book store. The economics that define success for that corner book store are significantly different than what Amazon would consider a success both from a profit margin as well as a volume point of view. The corner book store wins by effectively differentiating itself from it's much larger competitor. It's books are more expensive to buy, but possibly you can also buy a coffee or browse actual physical books or even have a conversation with a human. This differentiation attracts a unique customer profile and caters to an alternative market segment. A segment that possibly is willing to spend more for something they could have gotten cheaper at Amazon. These differentiators allow the corner book store to compete and even win business (within their niche) from that much larger competitor even though the price is higher. The same concept applies to cloud computing.

I suppose what I am saying is you will never win if your goal is be Amazon. You will win by not being Amazon. By being different. By embracing your niche.
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Interesting post by Ellen Rubin of CloudSwitch asking if Amazon is the Official Cloud Standard? Her post was inspired by a claim that Amazon’s API should be the basis for an industry standard. Something I've long been against for the simple reason that choice / innovation is good for business. Although I agree with Ellen that AWS has made huge contributions to advance cloud computing. And also agree that "their API is highly proven and widely used, their cloud is highly scalable, and they have by far the biggest traction of any cloud". But the question I ask is do cloud customers really care about the API, so much as the applications and sevice levels applied higher up the stack?

At Enomaly we currently have customers launching clouds around the globe, each of which have their own feature requests ranging from various storage approaches to any number of unique technical requirements. Out of all the requests we hear on a daily basis, the Amazon API is almost never is requested. Those who do request it are typically in the government or academic spaces. When it is, it's typically part of a broader RFP where it's mostly a check box and part of a laundry list of requirements. When pushed the answer is typically, -- it's not important. So I ask why the fascination with the AWS API's as a sales pitch when it appears neither service providers or their end customer really care? More to the point, why aren't there any other major cloud providers who support the format other than Amazon? The VMware API or even the Enomaly API are more broadly deployed if you count the number of unique public cloud service providers as your metric.

An API from a sales point of view isn't important because you're not selling an API. You're selling the applications that sit above the API and mostly those applications don't really care what's underneath. As a cloud service provider you're selling a value proposition, and unfortunately an API provides little inherent value other than potentially some reduction in development time if you decide to leave. Actually the really hard stuff is in moving Amazon machine images away from EC2 in a consistant way, which Amazon through their AMI format have made a practically impossible mission. [Paravirt, really?]

I'm not saying API's aren't important for cloud computing, just that with the emergence of meta cloud API such as LibCloud, Jclouds and others, programming against any one single unique cloud service provider API is no longer even a requirement. So my question to those who would have you believe the AWS API is important is again -- why? Is it because your only value is that in which there is little other than your API support? Or is there something I'm missing?
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Had an interesting conversation the other day with Adam, our lead interface developer at Enomaly. He's been our key AJAX and API developer on the Enomaly ECP platform for several years. During our random afternoon chat he basically said that AJAX is quite possibly the worst way to consume a RESTful API. He pointed out the purpose of a RESTful approach to API development & implementation is in its similarities to HTTP and more generally uri/urls -- each of which is easily viewable both programmatic as well as visually. The problem is AJAX is kind of the opposite. Most of the things that make the web great, such as urls, hyperlinks and bookmarking are not easily done or seen in a AJAX application. All the benefits to a RESTful architecture are hidden by the AJAX itself making development longer, more difficult to debug and often harder to scale.

The conversation certainly got me thinking, not that I think we're going to abandon our AJAX interface and it could be worse, it could be flash based. I'm wondering what others think about the apparent dichotomy between AJAX and a RESTful API?

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Long time Enomaly customer CentriLogic has just announced they've launched another regional cloud. Following on the success of their previous Canadian focused cloud service this one is in the United States. They've also announced a major new customer as part of the launch. Cookie Jar Entertainment, one of the world's leading creators, producers and marketers of animated and live-action programming, is the first customer to "go live" on its newly launched U.S.-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud. Cookie Jar Entertainment recently successfully completed an initial pilot with CentriLogic, and is now in the process of making the final transition for its consumer websites to the on-demand cloud service.

Powered by Enomaly's Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) CentriLogic's new enterprise-class cloud solution is one of the first North America-wide (Cross Border) IaaS offerings that provides a secure and scalable on-demand computing infrastructure for organizations to efficiently deliver content and information services over the Web. It is also one of the only providers to enable geopolitical delineation of data resources through its own dedicated facilities in the U.S. and Canada. The new U.S. cloud enhances CentriLogic's suite of hosting and managed services including, co-location, private and managed hosting, data management, security, network and professional services.

"The issue of where data resides is growing in relevance as organizations move to the cloud but are expressing growing concern about the corresponding regulatory and compliance issues," said Antonio Piraino, Vice President and Research Director of Tier1 Research, a division of The 451 Group. "As a result, cloud infrastructure providers that have multiple nodes in different regulatory and legal jurisdictions have a value proposition that will draw wider and more diverse opportunities."

According to Jim Latimer, Vice President of Client Solutions for CentriLogic, Cookie Jar Entertainment's commitment to the cloud for the Web components of its shows represents a significant milestone in the transition to cloud services. "Cookie Jar Entertainment has broken through the hype and is proving that on-demand cloud services can offer a significant strategic opportunity to manage resources in a more flexible and dynamic environment. Cloud computing is an ideal approach for Web properties; training environments, quality assurance and testing; SaaS and software development; or any other infrastructure where demand is highly elastic or unpredictable."

According to Mike Haas, Director of IT for Cookie Jar Entertainment, "We were outgrowing our infrastructure, and we had added many new sites and systems to house our Web content in different locations. When CentriLogic announced a cloud option, we saw an opportunity to consolidate our external-facing properties in a more dynamic and scalable environment that allowed room for both planned and unexpected growth. We have worked with CentriLogic for three years, so we knew that they could offer a rock solid solution."

CentriLogic's new cloud service allows customers to access and manage any number of virtual servers running Microsoft Windows or Linux through a Web-based dashboard, as well as automatically scale up and down their use of cloud servers through a robust Web-based API. Unique Public, Private, and Hybrid Cloud offerings are highly flexible, secure, and scalable and have been designed to comply with local information management and international data delineation requirements. The cloud can be used to host websites, power internal business applications, provide burst capacity to meet peak loads for existing systems, and provide a highly flexible, virtual element to an existing physical infrastructure.

For more information on services and pricing call 1-866-366-3678 or visit www.CentriLogic.com/cloud.
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I admit I'm writing this post in a slightly sleep deprived state. (If this post makes no sense you've been warned) As I ponder the possibilities of endless diaper changes at 2am, I had a few insights about the shift currently underway in both business and computing.

One - I don't know about you, but if I have to install a piece of software on my desktop, I won't. My first essential Truth of Cloud Computing is any consumer software created today, not in the cloud (on the internet), should be in the cloud.

Two - the browser is the only desktop application requirement.

Three - I'm calling the DevOps Truth.
When it comes to infrastructure - Anything that can be automated, should be automated.

Four - Simplicity is always better than complixity.

Five - Open is better than closed.

Six - Value is money made or money saved.

Seven - My customers customer is my customer.

Eight -  Empower your customers to be successful and in return you will be.

Nine - The OS doesn't matter.

Ten - Information wants to be free.

I'm sure there's more, please add your own essential truths to the comments.

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I'm happy to announce today that Enomaly has collaborated with HP and Intel to offer a complete end-to-end cloud IaaS platform for cloud service providers, hosting firms and Internet Data Center (IDC) providers. The solution is built on an optimized stack of HP products including HP ProLiant® servers, HP StorageWorks® storage system, ProCurve® Networking solution (3Com) powered by advanced Intel Xeon® processors. Essentially, everything you need to deploy a complete revenue focused cloud service.

HP/Enomaly hosting solutions enable you to offer timely, comprehensive services to your customers—whether you provide shared hosting, dedicated hosting, virtual/ cloud hosting or managed services. HP’s flexible, energy-efficient Intel Xeon® processor- based server, storage and networking solutions—coupled with Enomaly software solutions—help you overcome your primary business challenges:

• Lower costs by increasing the density of sites per server
• Increase average revenue per user by offering more hosting services and/or up-sell the customer to purchase additional services
• Increase predictability of capacity planning for the Service and understand the relationship of capacity to service level performance
• Automate the user experience and empower the end-user

Another exciting aspect of our collaboration with HP is with HP Financial Services. Our relationship provides a complete one stop shop for our customers. The collaboration enables Enomaly to offer a flexible purchase and lease program covering the complete ECP IaaS cloud stack (hardware and software).

Contact us for more information.
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Brenda and I are pround to announce our latest addition to the Family. Finnegan Anthony Cohen, born June 11th @ 1:18pm Eastern. 9 pounds 7oz.


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Another day, another announcement, Today I'm happy to announce that Enomaly and Ericom have partnered to offer a complete turnkey cloud desktop infrastructure (CDI) platform for managed service providers. The solution combines Ericom’s PowerTerm® WebConnect with Enomaly's Elastic Computing Platform® (ECP) enabling web hosting firms, data center operators and managed service providers to offer revenue generating cloud desktop services. The joint solution combines broad industry expertise, with proven, reliable, scalable and adaptable technology, into an easy to manage and quick to deploy platform. The ECP desktop platform is designed to meet the needs of service providers who are looking for an effective way to generate new revenue opportunities.

Enomaly / Ericom CDI is an Internet-centric computing approach to desktop management, deployment and delivery that combines the traditional thin-client, utility hosting, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and cloud storage. It is designed to give system administrators and end-users the best of both worlds: the ability to host remotely managed virtual desktops in a data center while giving end users a portable self-service PC desktop experience regardless of location -- billed on per usage basis.

We are also very aware of the current realities limiting virtual desktop infrastructure deployments -- they typically require too much upfront capital and complicated integration to make it feasible for most organizations. We believe that the combined Enomaly / Ericom Cloud Desktop platform is an attractive concept because of its potential to streamline and simplify management and support, enhance security and – more importantly – reduce IT costs.

By leveraging a cloud-based architecture, enterprises can quickly ramp up to virtual desktops, add or remove desktop capacity on-the-fly, and immediately enjoy the benefits of CDI's centralization, security and ease of management. There's no need for building an infrastructure and no complexity. Enterprise IT and end-users simply access a service provider's infrastructure, which already has the capacity and connectivity assets needed to support a high-performing service desktop environment.

Key Benefits Include;

Anywhere, Anytime Access
Empowers users with on-demand access to their virtual desktops when they need it, where they need it - from the office, home, road, customer site, etc.

Expedite Desktop Deployments
Enables swift, centralized desktop deployments, updates and maintenance—eliminating the hassle of local PC installations

Better Management and Control
Increases administrator's control over desktop configurations – while enabling desktop customization based on user needs

Enhanced Security
Desktops with applications and data are hosted within the datacenter – protecting sensitive information that would be compromised with stolen laptops or PCs

Full PC Desktop Experience
Virtual desktops maintain the same look and feel of traditional PCs – enabling a quick end-use migration to virtual desktops

Rich Integration with Existing Infrastructure
Support for various hypervisors including Xen®, KVM and VMware®.

Monetization and Back office Integration
Powerful back-office facing administrative API, enabling simple integration with providers' provisioning and billing systems and supporting automation of all administrative tasks.

Learn more about Enomaly Desktops at > http://ruv.net/a/cloudvdi
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Let's be honest, lately there hasn't been a lot of good news coming out of Louisiana, the gulf coast has taken quite the beating with the economic fallout from the BP oil spill. Finally we have some good news for the region. They now have their very own Cloud IaaS platform based in Lafayette, Louisiana -- a City that is quickly emerging as one of the best and most connected in the country.

Technology initiatives have helped fuel the region’s thriving business environment while building up a tech-savvy community. The City of Lafayette developed the nation’s largest and most robust municipally-owned fiber optic broadband infrastructure delivering 100 Megabit per second (Mbps) peer-to-peer broadband network within its city limits; another confirmation of lightening fast data connections and forward thinking.

Businesses in this creative environment are joining forces with worldwide service providers to create IT solutions with international applications. One such pairing is the Abacus Data Exchange (Lafayette, LA) and Enomaly. Together we have brought the concepts of “Cloud Computing” and “Elastic Platforms” into the local vocabulary. Picture a very green communications/data center with direct access to virtual dedicated servers for end-user applications, running on blazing fast fiber optic broadband network and connecting to anywhere on the planet.

To give you a little background on Lafayette, according to several studies naming “best” locations in the United States, Lafayette, Louisiana is a top choice as a place to live, to start a business, to enjoy the creative class and be happy. Relocate America lists Lafayette, Louisiana as one of the "Top 100 Places to Live". For this year's list, the editorial team focused on communities poised for recovery and future growth. They discovered that this mid-sized Louisiana city showed strong local leadership, employment opportunities, thriving community commitment, improving real estate markets, growing green initiatives, plentiful recreational options and overall high quality of life. Lafayette has a population of fewer than 200,000 and is located near the Gulf Coast, halfway between New Orleans and Houston.

Fortune Small Business ranked Lafayette as the #2 mid-sized city in the nation for small business startups. Lafayette was also named by Southern Business & Development Magazine as one of the top cities in the South for the "Creative Class". This designation is based on the community's commitment to technology, forward thinking and cultural diversity. And the list goes on... Louisiana ranks #1 in happiness according to Science Magazine's survey of 1.3 million people across the USA.

So why does Louisiana need it's own Cloud?

When the Abacus research team set out to design a next-generation cloud computing solution, it found a partner in Enomaly and its Elastic Computing Platform. By combining Abacus's expertise in managing green fiber optic broadband datacenters and Enomaly's cutting edge cloud computing technology, the Abacus Data Cloud offers direct access to variably sized on-demand virtual servers for end-user applications. Customers can easily provision their own virtual, high-performance, green-friendly on-line datacenter services within a matter of hours not days, using only the resources they need for the duration that they need them. The clean and simple Customer User Interface allows customers to tailor their cloud environment by provisioning virtual machines with specific application stacks and resource capacity. Built-in resource and usage monitoring provides real-time integrated billing and network reporting.

Customers are using the cloud platform to quickly and easily create virtual servers to host web sites, run internal business applications and provide burst capacity to meet peak loads when working on data-intensive operations.

“Working with Enomaly's ECP- SPE solution to provide our customers a cloud solution has been surprisingly easy. I've never felt more confident in the stability, user-friendliness and over all personalization of a publicly accessible interface as I do with Enomaly. Knowing that we have created a superior product benefits everyone” said Bryan Fuselier, CIO, Abacus Data Exchange

In addition to accessing virtual cloud resources, through the Abacus Data Cloud anyone, anywhere can replicate (take a virtual snapshot) their existing servers to prevent data and configuration loses, or plan for server replacement and upgrades on their own schedule.. Replica servers are activated when needed and turned off when tasks are finished. Additionally, everyone reduces server/IT infrastructure cost by moving towards a ‘green’ solution that cuts down on high utility use, cooling needs and hardware server support . The end-user’s ability to test new applications or engage in Web 2.0 development allows them to gain more effectiveness in critical in day-to-day operations. Cost savings kick in when businesses build extremely flexible server resources through leasing shared infrastructure. Businesses can create, access and manage these servers from any Internet connection through a personalized web-based dashboard that scales server resources up and down dynamically based on demand.

The Abacus Data Cloud delivers some of the world's fastest cloud computing, and people are is taking notice. “We are excited to include Abacus as a customer and we will be following their growing venture opportunities closely”, stated Dr. Richard Reiner, CEO of Enomaly. “We see great potential for a customizable, scalable and reliable high-speed virtual provisioning service using the Service Provider Edition of our Elastic Computing Platform in conjunction with a proven combination of a low-footprint data center and a high-speed fiber network solution.”

Customers can set up individual servers on their own within minutes, and entire datacenters can be virtualized within a matter of days. And because of Enomaly's integrated billing and network usage monitoring along with their clean user interface and clustering support, the Abacus Data Cloud offers the most cost-effective and customer-friendly cloud computing solution on the market today.

"The implications and potential are absolutely enormous" says Abigail Ransonet, CVO of Abacus. "The Abacus Data Cloud on a unified elastic computing platform running Enomaly's ECP SPE is a replicable business model that has a world wide customer-base. We create super-fast, easy-to-use virtual computing environments that businesses can scale up and down as needed. Our model exemplifies the dynamics of fiber optic broadband and innovative solutions. Building and managing on-line unified server technology just got very personal! We all have a sense of pride that we live and work in Lafayette, Louisiana, while we offer the entire world innovative technology solutions."

Learn more at abacusdataexchange.com
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Ask anyone involved in standing up a public cloud service and you'll hear the same story. The technology is relatively the easy part. The hard part is defining the business model aspects of your cloud service offering, more specifically defining sales models and pricing that works.

Often you'll hear a variety of buzz words thrown around like econmies of scale or low margin / high volume business when talking about Cloud Computing, but for the most part competing based on capital expense and volume isn't a reasonable approach. (We'll just out spend our competitors, ie. Microsoft spending billions on new data centers) Most revenue models break down into two basic groups, technical value (features) and cost (price / margin). As I've written before, value is about solving problems, but competitive pricing is also important.

Starting at bottom you have the freemium model, arguably one of the most useful approaches. This a model where you give away your service in hopes of monetizing at some later point or possibly selling ad space. I'd classify this as a high volume approach. Lots of users, some may pay -- maybe. The Free approach to service generates lots of users as well as lots of up front operational costs. So you'll need to consider your cost per sale ratio (CPS) closely. How much does it cost me to convert a free user into a paying customer? This converstion concept was made popular in the SEO realm where sites would calculate their ad prices based on the number of sales transactions an ad could potentially generate. Basically it was ROI based pricing. It's also the main driver behind the commerical open source movement. But today we're not talking about selling traditional software, but instead selling cloud services (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, etc,).

Another freemium approach is the free introductory service or a loss leader where a service is sold at a low price (at cost or below cost or free) to stimulate other profitable sales. If you've ever been to a retail store, you'll recognize this sales promotion tactic. Free ballons for the kids, cheap beer for Dad etc. What's interesting from my vantage point is a number of Enomaly ECP service providers have used this approach with great success. One of the more successful created a free "Beta" period which generated hundreds of user signups. This both helped test the cloud IaaS service & platform as well as provided a large pool of interested, and more importantly targeted customers to convert. And convert they did -- with more than 70% of the free customers ending up paying for the service after the beta phase was complete. I jokingly refer to this approach as the crack dealer sales approach. Get them hooked early and quickly.

Other approaches could include deferred payments, (we won't charge you unless you use it, or won't charge you for the first 90 days). You need to realize that users like free. But customers are willing to pay for something they like or see value in.

Which brings us to how much should you charge for your cloud service? Assuming you have competitors, (if you don't than you probably don't have any market for your service either) you'll want to likely be in the same ball part for the same basic service as your competitors. This will probably be an entry level service with little differentiation. The important aspect to pricing will be in the areas where you're different. Maybe you offer a premium storage or load balancer, or advanced security or something I haven't even thought of. The more value you provide the more you can charge for your services. Also the key metric is ROI and making sure you can easily demonstrate it, hopefully without a sales person - low or no touch sales are always better. These are areas that you can charge significantly more for because, you're costs are 'obviously' higher, and hopefully it's a better value than your customer attempting to create the service themselves or to buy from someone else.


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As you can probably tell I haven't been very inspired to write on the old blog lately. My wife [Brenny] is now 38 weeks pregnant so that's got me pretty busy with the last few things we need to do to prepare for our new arrival. From the new and exciting world of cloud computing, well nothing much new to report. Obviously interest is strong, people talk about clouds [possibly too much]. I admit. I've found myself wondering what's coming next. I think I've entered 'Gartner's trough of disillusionment'. Or to put it more plainly, I'm suffering from cloud-burn.

It's not that I'm sick of cloud computing per-se, but I'm just a little tired of the term itself. And the same same cloudy questions, What is cloud? Really? ME: It's cloudy, it's suppose to be fuzzy, it's not called clear computing now is it ;) Come on ppl. It's Internet computing. It's a way to make money. It's the the new black. Good enough. Move on, next question.

As for the blog world, since cloud has become the new black, it's really become the new boring for IT writers. Mainstream IT media now talks about how MegaSoft Corp or Big Yellow is losing or winning or both. I'm more interested in who's innovating. It's obvious the most innovate companies are those you've never heard of. I'm not sure why we choose to focus so much attention on those with the least interesting stories.

As for me. What am I into? Power / Green / carbon friendly computing maybe. The iPad looks cool, maybe energy efficient code is the next big thing? I don't know. I am really excited about the new baby. -- Oh yeah I mentioned that didn't I?

Over the next few weeks I'm house and office bound, so don't expect to see me at any CloudCamps or other various *Cloud* Conferences. It's not that I don't care, it's just I care too much -- about my family that is.


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I just got off our weekly Enomaly Webex in which I filled in as the host in place our product manager Pat Wendorf. I've become notorious for getting off topic when I do our Webex presentations and this week was no different. Actually doing these presentations really does help me think through some of my ideas as well as helping me get the temperature of the IaaS / hosting market of potential customers. Lately it seems that the questions have shifted from does your product have ABC or XYZ feature to how do we build a differentiated cloud service. These are the kind questions that I enjoy the most. So I'm going to explore this a bit today.

One of the biggest transitions in the hosting space over the last decade has been that of Virtual Private Servers (VPS)-- a market controlled effectively by one company, Parallels. A critical problem with the Virtuozzo Containers product line and approach has been that there is effectively no difference between any VPS hosting company. The lack of differentiation among the various VPS hosting firms has meant that the only real way to set your service apart from that of the other guys is based purely on price. This price centric approach to product/service differentiation creates a commodity market for all the providers. Basically they're sales pitch is "We're cheaper". This means you're now competing based on a low margin, high volume business, not on any real value proposition. Effectively the VPS space has become a race to zero. So in this market you'll find that most VPS hosting companies are now charging roughly the same low price, a few dollars a month, with the same low margins for same basic service. The only one making any real margin is Parallels at the expensive of their customers.

What's interesting about the emerging cloud service provider segment is the opportunity to differentiate based on the value you provide to your customers. It's not that you're cheaper than the other guy, but instead that you have an actual solution to a problem they have -- today. Maybe your platform can scale more easiliy, or you're in a specific region or city, you possibly you have a particular application deployment focus. In the case of Enomaly ECP when we developed our platform we focused on developing a cloud infrastructure with the capability to define various economic models that run the gamut from pure utility offering to quota or even tiered quality of service centric approaches. By doing so, we understand that there may still be multiple ECP deployments in a particular region, but from an end customer point of view (The customer of our customers) they can be significantly different from one another. This allows for competition based on business value not purely on price. I'll choose ECP cloud provider A because they solve my particular pain point, even though they may be more expensive than cloud B who doesn't.

My position has always been to create a shared success model, one that is mutually beneficial. The better our customers do, the better we do. A model that doesn't cannibalize our service provider customers margin in return for higher margins for us. A shared success value also provides an incentive to buy more licenses based on our customers growth. At the end of the day those 500 customers City Cloud in Sweden have now effectively become my responsibly too. (The customer of my customer is my customer) I win because my customers wins and they win because they're different, they're compelling and they have a service people need and more importantly want to buy.
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Interesting post today over at the Whitehouse.gov blog by Vivek Kundra, the U.S. Chief Information Officer. The post describes both the rationale as well as what cloud computing, at least what it means to the US Government.

Here are a couple of the more interesting parts.

"For those of you not familiar with cloud computing, here is a brief explanation. There was a time when every household, town, or village had its own water well. Today, shared public utilities give us access to clean water by simply turning on the tap. Cloud computing works a lot like our shared public utilities. However, instead of water coming from a tap, users access computing power from a pool of shared resources. Just like the tap in your kitchen, cloud computing services can be turned on or off as needed, and, when the tap isn’t on, not only can the water be used by someone else, but you aren’t paying for resources that you don’t use. Cloud computing is a new model for delivering computing resources – such as networks, servers, storage, or software applications."

The post clearly outlines the use of Cloud Computing within the US federal government's IT strategy. "The Obama Administration is committed to leveraging the power of cloud computing to help close the technology gap and deliver for the American people. I am hopeful that that the Recovery Board’s move to the cloud will serve as a model for making government’s use of technology smarter, better, and faster."

Read the rest here
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There is no better feeling than to see one our Enomaly ECP customers doing well in the competitive cloud service provider space. In particular City Cloud in Sweden has shared with me some interesting new customer wins including the Nobel Foundation's NobelPrize.org site. Yet another proof point is the City Cloud now boasts more than 500 customers. Proving the opportunity for regional compute clouds is real.
Also interesting to see the eco-system evolving around our customers including a new iphone app.

Congrats to the City Networks team! Keep on kicking IaaS!
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I'm happy to announce the first episode in a new series of Enomaly Podcasts focused on one of the most important questions when looking at building, deploying and running public cloud computing infrastructures. The question of how to Make Money. Over the next few weeks we'll be posting a series of podcasts exploring various revenue, business and ROI models for cloud infrastructure providers. The video podcast features Enomaly VP Sales Justin Groen and myself.


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A recent seven hour outage at Amazon Web Services on Saturday has renewed the discussion about cloud failures and whether the customer or the provider of the services should be held responsible. The conversation stems from two power outages on May 4 and an extended power loss early on Saturday, May 8. Saturday’s outage began at about 12:20 a.m. and lasted until 7:20 a.m., and affected a “set of racks,” according to Amazon, which said the bulk of customers in its U.S. East availability zone remained unaffected.

In one of the most direct posts, Amazon EBS sucks I just lost all my data, Dave Dopson said "they [AWS] promise redundancy, it is BS." Going on to point to AWS's statement " EBS volumes are designed to be highly available and reliable. Amazon EBS volume data is replicated across multiple servers in an Availability Zone to prevent the loss of data from the failure of any single component. The durability of your volume depends both on the size of your volume and the percentage of the data that has changed since your last snapshot. As an example, volumes that operate with 20 GB or lessof modified data since their most recent Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% –0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume. This compares with commodity hard disks that will typically fail with an AFR of around 4%, making EBS volumes 10 times more reliable than typical commodity disk drives."

Like many new users to cloud computing, he assumed that he could just use the service and upon failure AWS's redundancy would automatically fix any problems, because they do (sort of) say that they prevent data loss. What Amazon actually states is a little different in that "the durability of your volume depends both on the size of your volume and the percentage of the data that has changed since your last snapshot" placing the responsibility on the customer. On one hand they say that they prevent data loss, but only if you use the AWS cloud correctly, otherwise you're SOL. The reality is that AWS for most users requires significant failure planning -- in this case the use of EBS's snap shot capability. The problem is that most [new] users have a hard time learning the rules of the road. A quick search for AWS failure planning on the AWS forums resulted in little additional insights and really appears to mostly about trial and error.

In the case of hardware failures Amazon expects you to design your architecture correctly for these kinds of events by use of redundancy, for example use mutliple VM's etc. They expect a certain level of knowledge of both system administration as well as how AWS itself has been designed to be used. Newbies need not apply or should use at you're own risk. Which isn't all that clear to a new user, who hears that cloud computing is safe and the answer to all your problems. Which I admit should be a red flag in itself. The problem is two fold, an over hyped technology and unclear failure models which combine to create a perfect storm. You need the late adopters for the real revenue opportunities, but these same late adopters require a different more gentle kind of cloud service, probably one a little more platform than infrastructure focused. As IaaS matures it is becoming obvious that the "Über Geek" developers who first adopted the service is not where the long tail revenue opportunities are. To make IaaS viable to a broader market, AWS and other IaaS vendors need to mature their platforms for a lesser type of user. (A lower or least common denominator) One who is smart enough to be dangerous, otherwise they're doomed to be limited to the only for experts only segment.

The bigger question is should a cloud user have to worry about hardware failures or should these types of failures be the sole responsiblity of the service provider? My opinion is deploying to the cloud should reduce complexity, not increase it. The user should be responsible for what they have access to, so in the case of AWS, they should be responsible for failures that are brought about by the applications and related components they build and deploy, not by the hardware. If hardware fails (which it will) this should be the responsibility of those who manage and provide it. Making things worst is promising to be highly available, reliable and redundant, but with the fine print of "if you are smart enough to use all our services in the proper way" which isn't fair. If EBS is automatically replicated why did Dave lose all his data?

In a optimal cloud environment any single server failures shouldn't matter. But it appears at AWS it does.
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If you're like me and spend a lot of time organizing cloud related events and get togethers you'll understand the value of finding good cloud related songs. Well look no further, I've put together the ultimate cloud related song list over at Grooveshark.com called Cloudy with a Chance of Scale or see the widget below.






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Until recently I've been in an odd spot, generally speaking my biggest competition when a potential customer came to us looking for an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform was either to build it yourself (aka huge risk) or buy it from us. (Yes there were a few other competitors) But for the most part the space was a greenfield, we really didn't have to worry about our competitors because there weren't many and the ones that were out there were positioned in a significantly different way than us. The problem with being first is one of education, most potential customers didn't even realize they needed a cloud platform. The good news is things are changing, the idea of Infrastructure as a service is no longer a radical one. IaaS companies are getting funded left and right and customers are buying. I've long held the notion that an industry isn't real until you have direct competitors. This both proves there is an opportunity as well as brings a broader awareness. A rising tide floats all boats if you will. In my post today, I thought I'd briefly explore the value proposition of IaaS.

So you ask what's the value of providing an Infrastructure as a Service? From a private point of view it's most about efficiency, the draw back is you need to spend money to save money. Which can be a tough sell in a rough economic climate. From a public cloud context it's about converting costs (Fixed to Variable, Capex to Opex etc). Ok, we've heard the story before. It's really about saving money or not losing it to a more nimble competitor. So the real question becomes how do you unlock the value of an IaaS cloud, either internally or externally or both? For me it's all about the application.

If done right, an IaaS platform provides a simple unified interface to your infrastructure. At it's heart it simplifies your infrastructure so you can focus on what matters most, the applications that run on it. It also changes the job of a system/network admin from one of being reactive to one of being proactive. If a server dies, who cares -- leave it. Instead hot-add additional servers just in time based on automatic utilization notifications. Where previously a sysadmin could manage dozens of servers that same admin can now manage thousands, because no one server really matters. It's the overall cloud that matters. IaaS allows you to focus higher in the stack, where the real business value really lies. Do you think end users really case what flavor of load balancer you're using? Probably not. What they do care about is what application they can have instant access to when they have a real problem they need solved. And when it's deployed it will scale to handle anything they through at it. The application just works.

Another one of the more puzzling approaches I've seen a lot lately in the virtualization and IaaS space is that of the so called "Virtual Data Center". Basically what a few of the more backward thinking vendors are saying is, let's recreate the traditional physical experience of running a datacenter but in a virtual or cloud context. Some have even gone to the extent of creating virtual blades which graphically look like physical servers to get their point across. To which I say why? Infrastructure is already too complex so why would I want to recreate an already painful experience. The sales pitch is do what you've already done. I think a better approach is to instead take what you've already done and make it better, easier, more efficient and ultimately simpler. Instead of recreating complexity, I say remove it. If someone is trying to sell you a "Virtual Data Center" I say run. What they should be selling you is business value, how can this save or make you money. The value of IaaS is that it just works, it just scales and it makes you money. Not how many features can we cram into a user interface. And more importantly from a technical standpoint it doesn't require endless hours of configuration and testing. Yep, it's turnkey.

The biggest value of an IaaS platform is as a stepping stone -- one that allows you to gracefully migrate from the traditional physical single tenant infrastructure of the past to a multi-tenant distributed cloud of the future, while not requiring you to completely re-architect or rebuild your applications for it. What IaaS does is move the need to make your applications multi-tenant by making your infrastructure mutli-tenant. If it doesn't accomplish this, than it's not IaaS and there's not a lot of value in it.
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