HCTS summary

While attending the The Host and Cloud Transformation Summit, an event being put on by another business unit of The 451 Group, my employer, I had the opportunity to speak with end-users, suppliers of hardware, software and cloud services. I found it very interesting to observe the different approaches to cloud computing demonstrated by each group.

• Representatives of end-user organizations showed a great deal of interest in cloud computing. That could be expected of someone who came to Las Vegas from somewhere else to attend an event titled "Host and Cloud Transformation Summit", of course. The usual comments about security, surviving an audit and complying with regulations were heard. Many of these people indicated that they had selected a non-critical task and were trying out placing it in a cloud environment.
• Suppliers of hardware and software product all presented that they were uniquely qualified to be the supplier of choice. It appeared to me that many had just taken their current product and added a new slide to their old marketing deck that spoke about the wonders of cloud computing.  If the truth be told, their products clearly could be used as part of a Software as a Service (SaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment. So, they weren't really stretching the truth.
• Suppliers of hosting, managed and collocation services pointed out that they were already offering the infrastructure needed for cloud computing.  Typically, they would point out that they had partnerships in place with VMware, Citrix and/or Microsoft to round out their cloud offerings.

This was quite an interesting event for me. I learned quite a bit. Suppliers seemed to have learned to tone down their unbelievable promises. They appear, however, to be addicted to the phrase "uniquely qualified" when speaking about products, services and how they are positioned in the market.