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Cloud Is "Open" For Business: The Debate Begins

CloudScale's re-launch this week as an “open cloud” company, coupled with an announcement of an Open Cloud Alliance by giants Atos, EMC, and VMware has ignited a new controversy and debate. A previous spate of “cloudwashing” allegations are now joined by cries of “open washing” and discussion of whether there is even such a thing as “open cloud.” Arguments, counter-arguments, rebuttals, and counter-rebuttals all have detailed points of contention, which I'll be studying in more detail over this long week-end. If nothing else, the new open-cloud discussion may move the public v private cloud debate into a more clearly defined onsite vs. offsite debate. In this case, it's not really a “this vs. that” debate at all, but rather, different strokes for different folks. As CloudScale's Randy Bias is arguing, there's a big difference between legacy apps being dressed up as cloud via virtualization on-site and doing entirely new things offsite with Amazon. This stuff is important, given the hundreds of billions of dollars of enterprise IT budget in the US alone and a historical aversion by IT management to move to something new when they're confused. It's long been said that producing consumer electronics is harder than business technology because consumers won't put up with stuff that doesn't, you know, work. But in our modern age, it seems that consumers are more likely to be blinded by shiny new toys than business IT buyers, and that purveyors of technology to this latter group aren't as free to, shall we say, obfuscate. That said, FUD is the most venerable acronym in the IT sales lexicon, and the open-cloud debate may have some characteristics of this industry warhorse. But to be honest, the comments have been coming so fast and furious, I don't quite know what to think just yet. And maybe that's the point. If IT buyers are similarly confused, then maybe nobody will buy anything – and that's a discussion we really don't want to open.

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Source: Latest News from Cloud Computing Journal | 22 Feb 2012 | 1:00 am

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