Automation in the cloud still in flux

Summary: The boundaries and market requirements for cloud automation products are still emerging making it difficult to define this market.

By Dan Kusnetzky for Virtually Speaking | December 16, 2009 -- 03:00 GMT (19:00 PST)

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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.

Topics: Hardware, Cloud, Virtualization

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Blogging about nothing

That's a more appropriate title for this blog. Come on Kusnetzky. I've seen you do better. So it's a slack news day. That doesn't mean you have to become another cloud waver. Here's all we have to know about "the cloud": You simply rent what you used to buy.

nikacat

16 December, 2009 22:51

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Cloud weaver?

One of my roles is research director for the 451 Group's cloudscape service. In a given month we publish 30 to 40 short reports on cloud-focused industry events, mergers, acquisitions and one long form report examining cloud technology in greater detail.

It's a very rapidly growing market space with a great deal of activity. We're watching well over 200 suppliers of technology, managed and hosting services providers and speaking with many organizations using this approach in their day-to-day operations.

It is interesting that you perceive this as purely a marketing term with little or no substance.

Dan K

dkusnetzky
19 December, 2009 04:00

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Blogging about nothing

Cloud weaver?