Pushing Clouds into Focus

Open source operating platform vendor Red Hat, Inc. released part of its code base to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) to serve as a standard for workload management across cloud platforms. Elsewhere, a new collaborative hopes to speed time-to-market and ease management issues for cloud offerings.  Lastly, Hewlett-Packard, Co. (HP) and CA Technologies

announced acquisitions as they cement their cloud strategies.

Focal Points:

• Red Hat is hoping to help cloud-based service adoption to continue its expanding adoption rates by addressing one of the largest concerns with adoptions. That concern is cloud interoperability, and Red Hat is submitting its Deltacloud cloud platform to the DMTF for approval as an industry standard to enable cross-vendor cloud communication. Red Hat has already relinquished the Deltacloud code to the Apache Incubator and started a new Web site called APIwanted.org to encourage functionality requests. The collection of enabling open source application programming interfaces (APIs) is admittedly still emerging as they have only been collectively combined as Deltacloud for slightly less than one year.  Red Hat, however, believes that the platform has real potential and that third-party governance and support can deliver cloud-based toolsets required. The company reports that major enterprise vendors including Cisco Systems, Inc., Dell Inc., HP, IBM Corp., Intel Corp., and others are already using Deltacloud in some way.
• A new coalition comprised of Eucalyptus Systems, Inc., newScale Inc., rPath Inc., and MomentumSI is working to enable enterprise-hosted cloud systems to act more like those hosted in the public cloud. Each vendor lends its technology set to hasten virtualized deployments while providing chargeback capabilities using automated system deployment and maintenance enabled with systems integration assistance capabilities. Elsewhere, CA Technologies continues to improve its cloud capabilities with support for Amazon.com Web Services and another acquisition. In announcement this week, CA declared that its CA Virtual, CA Service Automation, CA Service Assurance and the newly-acquiring Nimsoft Monitoring Solution can now easily plug into the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. The company is also acquiring Arcot Systems, Inc. in a $200 million cash deal. Arcot offers cloud-based authentication and security solutions that will be integrated into CA's Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions.
• HP announced it will acquire privately-held Stratavia Inc. for an undisclosed amount in an effort to boost automation in its HP’s Cloud Service Automation products. Stratavia develops application lifecycle automation tools, including its Data Palette Platform, which can help application developers and operational teams model, configure, and manage applications. The tool incorporates autodiscovery, application and database configuration management, and role-based controls for a host of popular software.

Experton Group believes the large vendors' mad dash to acquire vendors with cloud-oriented products and deliver hooks linking their products and enterprise and public clouds is in full force. Enterprise moves to enable and take advantage of cloud offerings are also in full force; however, it is important to remember that many solutions are leading edge and technologies are rapidly evolving. Many of these vendor moves are aids to help them position their product sets as leaders and standards. IT executives must remain vigilant of the trials that accompany new technology adoption – particularly when standards have yet to emerge. IT executives will find that the most effective cloud adoptions are those that utilize proven technologies already in use in the corporation and that enterprise-based cloud adoption mitigates adoption risks as technologies, rollouts, and support mechanisms are far more controllable. Whether sourced internally or on the public cloud, enterprises should prepare themselves for the eventual migration to more standards-based offerings as long-term leaders emerge.