The Momentum You Can’t Ignore

Two years ago, cloud computing was just a new concept. To some extend, many enterprises were still skeptical. The industry was still trying to figure out whether the cloud is a technology, a marketing term,  or a business model. And Larry had a fun to bash it. He was sarcastic at that time. But he touched a good point – what is a cloud?

Today, the landscape has changed. As I talked to many of our customers during past year, I can feel the momentum. Initially, many questions I was asked were about what the cloud is. I called it stage day 0. Then six months ago, the questions were more and more about the use and implementation of the cloud. GoGrid recently did a survey and found that 45% of their respondents use IaaS in some way, shape or form. Ovum also surveyed multinational clients and concluded same trend. In the same time, there are many cloud delivery solutions, such as BMC’s Cloud Lifecycle Management , VMware’s vCloud Director, and even Oracle itself, coming into the market. These solutions help companies build a cloud and make it up and running. This is stage day 1.

In the last couple of months, I started to hear questions, such as

• “How can I make sure my cloud environment run without outage?”
• “How do I know whether my cloud services are in an acceptable availability level?”
• “How can I fully automate my cloud operations process so that I can realize the cloud promise – higher quality of service with lower operating costs?”

These questions reflect the fact that those customers have embraced the concept of cloud and are in the stage to take advantage of the full value of the cloud computing. They graduated from day 0, busy in day 1, and ready to go to day 2, where cloud operations management will play a major role to help them realize the value of the cloud.