Cloudcast

Is Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Now a Commodity?

During VMworld in Sep we saw the launch of several ‘vCloud Express’ partners that aim to provide some more competition for Amazon EC2. It’s getting to be a crowded market place with players such as Rackspace and GoGrid also providing very similar offerings. Have we reached the point where Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings are now a commodity and price is the only differentiator? Not unsurprisingly, the answer is yes (and no).

If a customer’s goal is to run a virtual machine with a base operating system of Windows Server or Linux in the cloud, the answer to the question is almost certainly ‘yes’. All these cloud providers offer that capability and pricing ranges from 4 cents per hour upwards, depending on the size/configuration of virtual machine. This will certainly add serious pressure on managed service providers who have historically charged a premium for setting up and running hosted virtual machines.

However, if a customer’s goal is to solve a problem like ‘I need my global development and test teams to collaborate in the cloud to get our applications delivered faster’ or ‘I want a secure, self-service portal for my users to access ad-hoc data centers on demand according to pre-determined policies’, then the answer is a resounding ‘no’. ‘Infrastructure-as-a-Service’ enables more efficient and scalable provisioning of virtual machines, but it doesn’t solve the challenges of business process integration, workflow, security, compliance, monitoring, and management and automation that customers need. For instance, a typical IaaS vendors’ networking technology falls well short of enabling secure integration of cloud infrastructure into the enterprise, and a typical IaaS vendor’s storage architecture doesn’t support automation capabilities such as snapshots of memory states and datacenter cloning (a killer feature in the workflow of replicating defects in development and test). So, the current IaaS vendor pitch seems to be “here’s a bunch of unconfigured servers to solve your problem – except now you can get them faster and cheaper.”

At Skytap, we’ve long recognized the importance of solving customers’ problems rather than providing raw infrastructure. In fact, we think of ourselves more as an enterprise cloud solution provider than an ‘IaaS’ company due to the amount of focus we’ve put into our ‘SaaS’ self-service portal, management and automation, cost control and chargeback, and team collaboration capabilities. This focus has ensured we’re recognized as the ‘go to’ vendor to solve application development, IT testing, virtual training and software demo challenges with our cloud platform. We’ve now surpassed the 100+ customer mark and signing up new customers everyday (including Fortune 500 companies due to our expertise in security and compliance issues).

So, although we’re seeing a commodiziation in raw ‘virtual machines on demand’, we think this is still just the beginning. Solutions providers that can integrate cloud computing resources into enterprise infrastructure to enable businesses to be more adaptive and reduce costs will emerge the winners. We’re seeing a ‘tipping point’ with the customers and prospects we’re working with and expect there will be a huge amount of innovation and adoption in the market over the next year. In fact, a technology executive on Wall St this week told me ‘If you had talked to me 6 months ago, I would have said come back later. Now, I’d be fired if I suggested we buy more servers rather than figure out a way to harness cloud service providers like Skytap.’ And, at Skytap, we certainly intend to be at the forefront of innovation and make the transition to enterprise cloud computing a reality!

Ian