Automation in the cloud still in flux

Greg Zwakman, Manager for 451 Research's Quantitative Research unit, and I have been working through a complex supply-side revenue model of the cloud economy for an upcoming report.  Automation is an area that is very dynamic, but produces only a small portion (on the order of 4%) of the overall cloud market.

What's so challenging is that many suppliers of monitors for high performance computing have recently targeted cloud deployments in their newest releases. The same can be said of those offering high availability/clustering monitors. The application virtualization folks have also announced that their frameworks would also support physical, virtual, cloud and hybrid deployments of applications. Large suppliers, such as CA, HP, IBM and Microsoft, are also enhancing and then repurposing their products to play in the cloud market.

So, what constitutes a cloud automation product? At this point, the consensus of opinion is that products that offer billing, provisioning, orchestration, lifecycle management and permissioning belong in this category.

What is clear, however, is that this market is still emerging and both the boundaries between product categories and the market requirements for those categories are in flux and changes are likely to be seen over the coming months.