apps to run on a cloud-computing environment. "We strongly feel that people are going to choose the best of both worlds (software and services). Practically, SaaS is just a delivery mechanism. It is not a platform paradigm. Software plus service is actually a platform paradigm and will reflect how people are going to consume software going forward," says Tarun Gulati, GM, marketing and operations, Microsoft India.
Conventionally, HPC has always been the ruling ground of open source software. Now, Microsoft wants some of that action. "Microsoft has made significant inroads in HPC in the last few years. MS Windows has started to fit architecturally with this grid model," points out Staten.
This is giving an unparalleled boost to Microsoft's cloud initiatives. "With our online suite of offerings, we are currently talking about online versions of our Exchange, SharePoint and Unified Communications stacks of software. Going forward, most apps will slowly start to have services-component built in. This will give more choices to enterprises in their decisions to consume software. Whether they want to have full control or if they would like to consume software as a service. Or may be, they would like to choose a hybrid model, where certain elements will be deployed locally and the rest is hosted on a cloud environment. We have, for example, MS Exchange online, which has shared APIs and configurability built across to be deployed as a service to enterprises. Going forward, we will have our CRM enabled for online computing," says Gulati.
Are the Clouds Ready?
"For a service to be ready for enterprises to consume, it must pass from the early-adopter phase (few enterprises using it with most deployments being experimental and used in non-business critical projects) to early majority, says Staten. "Evidence of being at this stage comes from a sufficient volume of direct enterprise customer references using the service for business-critical purposes. We were not able to verify enough customer references (even off the record) to conclude that cloud computing has crossed over from early adopter to early majority. However, platforms are maturing and will start to better meet enterprise needs in the next two to three years."
As appealing as the cloud concept sounds, it isn't on the radar of most enterprise IT shops. An informal survey of the Forrester Leadership Board of Infrastructure & Operations professionals on interest in, or use of, clouds yielded a resounding silence. The reasons are:
-- Concerns about stability. Most cloud vendors today do not provide availability assurances. Service-level agreements (SLAs) are mostly non-existent.
-- Few big-name players offering clouds. Apart from Amazon Web Services, Salesforce.com, and Akamai -- and rumors that Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! entering this space -- there's no sign of the biggies. But until they enter, enterprise IT is likely to stay away.
-- Few enterprise reference accounts. Despite repeated requests to vendors and efforts by Forrester, few enterprises could be found or were willing to identify themselves as cloud users. Lack of references will hold back adoption.
-- Little geographic locality. With the exception of Akamai and Layered Technologies, no cloud vendors will place your app in a specific geography. In fact, most don't have geographic coverage. Amazon EC2 does, but won't tell you where your app is located, nor can you request a specific geography today.
-- Not very enterprise friendly. Most cloud offerings aren't easy for enterprises to consume. Most don't allow embedding security and management agents and monitors. Amazon EC2 is not Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards-compliant, which is a problem. And few vendors provide security or process compliance audits.
Nevertheless, analysts and industry experts feel that cloud computing shows tremendous promise and once initial issues are ironed out, the new infrastructure services delivery model is going to catch on. "For small Indian startups or enterprises that do not have huge capacity requirements, cloud computing
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