The following is a post by Jeff Kaplan of THINKstrategies, Inc., who will be participating on a panel at HostingCon 2010 titled “Enabling ISVs To Go SaaS with Hosted Infrastructure as a Service Solutions” on Tuesday, July 20th, at 2:00pm.
The emergence of highly elastic, pay-per-use Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing services, along with a growing assortment of powerful Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings from various vendors, pose an escalating series of unprecedented challenges for traditional hosting companies.
Over the past decade, many hosting companies made a living by offering a set of relatively undifferentiated (i.e., ‘vanilla’) services. These included basic and managed storage, web hosting and application management.
While these services were sufficient to meet most customers’ needs in the past, they are quickly becoming commoditized by a new generation of IaaS, SaaS and PaaS solutions which offer greater functionality and ease-of-use at lower prices.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Engine have redefined how compute power is delivered and applications are developed, while Salesforce.com has proven that enterprise applications can be sold as SaaS solutions.
In turn, these ‘on-demand’ services have redefined the software and technology marketplace, along with the hosting industry.
The success of these IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions has attracted a myriad of imitators and nannabes competing for a share of the rapidly evolving cloud computing market. Major vendors ranging from IBM and Microsoft to HP and Oracle are now recreating themselves into cloud vendors.
This ‘cloud rush’ will inevitably result in an industry shakeout and consolidation, The question is how many of today’s hosting companies will survive versus those which will be swept away in the flood of new cloud computing services.
THINKstrategies believes that the survival of old-guard hosting companies will depend on a mix of innovative technologies, go-to-market strategies and customer support best practices.
In our view, the hosting survivors will be those companies who embrace virtualization, put automated self-provisioning capabilities in place, and provide quality service to their customers.
The winners will also be the hosting companies which offer a multi-dimensional mix of solutions which give their corporate customers various options to meet their particular business needs, and enable them to achieve their goals and objectives in a more cost-effective fashion.
About Jeffery Kaplan:
Kaplan is the Managing Director of THINKstrategies (www.thinkstrategies.com) and Founder of the SaaS Showplace (www.saas-showplace.com). He can be reached at jkaplan[at]thinkstrategies.com.
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There is alot of thrashing in this space and it is hard to determine which Cloud to goto as everyone is doing something a little different – its hard to compare Cloud 2 Cloud. A similar diagnosis is by David Chappell:
“If I ruled the world”, says David Chappell, “I would make the phrase ‘private cloud’ illegal”. In conversation with David Gristwood, David Chappell, during his recent world tour, discusses the Cloud, its importance and role in the partner ecosystem, and cloud players, such as Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com, VMware and more. You can see his Cloud2Cloud comparison in brief here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7NHQdh8_uo
A more recent talk with David Chappell on this topic where he covers others issues such as:
- IaaS vs PaaS
- Private vs Public Cloud
- Applications that are not a great fit for the Cloud and those which are.
- The threat of Public Cloud to IT departments
see: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts.....Computing/
thoughts?
hope that helps,
-cn