At the recently concluded Oracle OpenWorld
2012, the center of discussion was clearly Cloud. Over the five action packed
days, I got to meet a large number of customers and most of them had serious
interest in all things cloud. Public Cloud - particularly the Oracle
Cloud - clearly got a lot of attention and interest. I think the use cases and
the value proposition for public cloud is pretty straight forward. However,
when it comes to private cloud, there were some interesting revelations.
Well, I shouldn’t really call them revelations since they are pretty consistent
with what I have heard from customers at other conferences as well as during
1:1 interactions.
While the interest in enterprise private cloud remains
to be very high, only a handful of enterprises have truly embarked on a journey
to create what the purists would call true private cloud - with capabilities such as
self-service and chargeback/show back. For a large majority, today's reality is
simply consolidation and virtualization - and they are quite far off from
creating an agile, self-service and transparent IT infrastructure which
is what the enterprise cloud is all about. Even a handful of those
who have actually implemented a close-to-real enterprise private cloud have taken an infrastructure centric approach and are seeing only limited business
upside. Quite a few were frank enough to admit that chargeback and self-service
isn’t something that they see an immediate need for.
This is in quite contrast to the picture
being painted by all those surveys out there that show a large number of
enterprises having already implemented an enterprise private cloud. On the face of
it, this seems quite contrary to the observations outlined above. So what
exactly is the reality?
Well, the reality is that there is
undoubtedly a huge amount of interest among enterprises about transforming
their legacy IT environment - which is often seen as too rigid, too fragmented,
and ultimately too expensive - to something more agile, transparent and
business-focused. At the same time however, there is a great deal of confusion
among CIOs and architects about how to get there. This isn't very surprising
given all the buzz and hype surrounding cloud computing. Every IT vendor claims
to have the most unique solution and there isn't a single IT product out there
that does not have a cloud angle to it. Add to this the chatter on the
blogosphere, it will get even a sane mind spinning. Consequently,
most enterprises are still struggling to fully understand the concept and
value of enterprise private cloud. Even among those who have chosen to
move forward relatively early, quite a few have made their decisions more based
on vendor influence/preferences rather than what their businesses actually
need. Clearly, there is a disconnect between the promise of the
enterprise private cloud and the current adoption trends.
So what is the way forward? I
certainly do not claim to have all the answers. But here is a perspective that
many cloud practitioners have found useful and thus worth sharing.
To take a step back, the fundamental
premise of the enterprise private cloud is IT transformation. It is the quest
to create a more agile, transparent and efficient IT infrastructure that is
driven more by business needs rather than constrained by operational and
procedural inefficiencies. It is the new way of delivering and consuming IT
services - where the IT organizations operate more like enablers of
strategic services rather than just being the gatekeepers of IT resources. In
an enterprise private cloud environment, IT organizations are expected to
empower the end users via self-service access/control and provide the business
stakeholders a transparent view of how the resources are being used, what’s the
cost of delivering a given service, how well are the customers being served,
etc. But the most important thing to note here is the enterprise private
cloud is not just an IT project, rather it is a business initiative to create
an IT setup that is more aligned with the needs of today's dynamic and highly
competitive business environment. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Just remember
how the business users have been at the forefront of public cloud adoption
within enterprises and private cloud is no exception.
Such a broad-based transformation makes
cloud more than a technology initiative. It requires people (organizational)
and process changes as well, and these changes are as critical as is the choice
of right tools and technology. In my next blog, I will share how essential it is for enterprise cloud technology to go hand-in hand with process re-engineering and organization changes to unlock true value of enterprise cloud.
I am sharing a short video from my session "Managing your private Cloud" at Oracle OpenWorld 2012. More videos from this session will be posted at the recently introduced Zero to Cloud resource page.
Many other experts of Oracle enterprise private cloud solution will join me on this blog "Zero to Cloud" and share best practices , deployment tips and information on how to plan, build, deploy, monitor, manage , meter and optimize the enterprise private cloud. We look forward to your feedback, suggestions and having an engaging conversion with you on this blog.
