I had a full day at Gartner DC LV conference. At the end of the day I got a good question on what I saw in the future. Cloud is top of the topics being discussed.
Lots of people are thinking about building private clouds, but how many people know how to build an operating system for the cloud. A common tweet from #GartnerDC
barton808 Barton George
by sean_kelley_ms
66% of folks here say they will be pursuing private cloud by 2014.#gartnerDC
So a safe answer is private cloud is the future of IT. High utilized hardware. Dynamic Infrastructure.
Gartner has been saying the private cloud is coming for a while here is a post from 2009.
I believe that enterprises will spend more money building private cloud computing services over the next three years than buying services from cloud computing providers. But those investments will also make them better cloud computing customers in the future.
Building a private cloud computing environment is not just a technology thing – it also changes management processes, organization/culture, and relationship with business customers (our Infrastructure and Operations Maturity Model has a roadmap for all four). And these changes will make it easier for an IT organization and its customers to make good cloudsourcing decisions and transitions in the future.
The ability for people to understand the private cloud is daunting. The choices are large and growing faster than people can understand. All of this reminds me of the arrival of Desktop Publishing. with new issues for typography, color matching, images, layout, printers,scanners, and SW.
Desktop publishing began in 1985 with the introduction of MacPublisher, the first WYSIWYG layout program, which ran on the original 128K Macintosh computer. (Desktop typesetting, with only limited page makeup facilities, had arrived in 1978–9 with the introduction of TeX, and was extended in the early 1980s by LaTeX.) The DTP market exploded in 1985 with the introduction in January of the Apple LaserWriter printer, and later in July with the introduction of PageMaker software from Aldus which rapidly became the DTP industry standard software.
Before the advent of desktop publishing, the only option available to most persons for producing typed (as opposed to handwritten) documents was a typewriter, which offered only a handful of typefaces (usually fixed-width) and one or two font sizes. The ability to create WYSIWYG page layouts on screen and then print pages at crisp 300 dpi resolution was revolutionary for both the typesetting industry and the personal computer industry. Newspapers and other print publications made the move to DTP-based programs from older layout systems like Atex and other such programs in the early 1980s.
Now if you are an experienced Operating System developer and have a team who can make the design trade-offs in designing a private cloud the transition to private cloud will be like print publications that moved to Mac based DTP. But the number of IT organizations with this skill set are only a handful - Google, Microsoft, VMware, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, etc. Maybe at the most 6% of the installed base has these skills and ability to recruit top talent, so what happens to the remaining 60% of the 66% that are building private clouds?
We are going to see some really bad $h*!.
Private clouds that are bad performers. Clouds that have bad UI. Manageability requires giving a UI to the private cloud. How many IT organizations have a user interface design team?
Building a private cloud is like building an operating system to manage the resources in IT with UI for system administrators designed for your internal users.
Now the smart guys have figured out they can hire experience operating system staff. Why do you think Google hired so many Microsoft guys? Microsoft hired a bunch of DEC guys to work on NT.
If you don't want to build some really bad $h*! you should think of hiring some OS guys. I have a friend who runs a technical executive placement company and I think she should start up a private cloud placement service.
Are you in the 6% group with OS level talent or in the 60% group who is new to DTP and have an organization who sees the private cloud as the answer to take control.
Keep in mind this Gartner statement.
I believe that enterprises will spend more money building private cloud computing services over the next three years than buying services from cloud computing providers.
The analyst and vendors are going to market private cloud so it is unstoppable. Just saying no to the private cloud is not an option.
Gartner DC LV is a great event to meet people and circulate ideas. Today is a full day of interviews, business disconnections, and making new connections.