http://blog.gravitant.com/2011/12/19/what-do-we-mean-by-cloud/
“In all the
ambiguity of what adds value to the Cloud or what facilitates the Cloud,
Gravitant sits at the intersection of both, which makes it a pure Cloud company
with all the experience, expertise, and solutions built around the Cloud.”
I’ve been writing mostly about what we’ve been developing for and around the Cloud in Gravitant, recently. Now is the time to elaborate a little bit about what’s being said and done about the Cloud outside of Gravitant. I am not intending to analyze specific articles, rather present an overall picture of the impression I get about what is out there and where Gravitant stands in this picture.
As
Cloud is getting hype and determining the next generation of IT and what the
Internet constitutes of, it is getting a whole lot of attention from the actors
of the sector and beyond. While the Cloud has defined itself during its
construction with a bottom-to-top approach, recently the new actors of the
Cloud are trying to define/re-define the Cloud with a top-to-bottom view.
The
concept of IT resource sharing can be dated back as far as the use of
mainframe, the Internet, VMware, or EC2 depending on your perception. However,
the name “Cloud” -which is cleverly set by the way- comes definitely after
commoditization of IT resources, which is very recent. Before Cloud became the
“Cloud”, standards of traditional IT had given direction to all innovative
efforts towards Cloud. These efforts have been very technical and mostly
motivated by infrastructure oriented improvements. Later on, the
commoditization of IT resources has required the business model to be well
defined. Although there is a lot of technical, infrastructural advancements
noted, probably most of the focus is in the definition of business of the
Cloud.
I have
read many blog articles, white papers and research papers about the Cloud in
addition to web content of cloud companies. If there is one thing common among
all these articles, that is what exactly could be labeled as Cloud is not very
clear. I get same kind of confusion among my colleagues as an Analytics
professional, too. Most of the time, boundaries of the field of Analytics is
not very clear. It makes sense in both cases, because their definitions of businesses
are still in progress. However, I believe certain examples could draw a more
indicative line of what could be called as a pure Cloud effort.
Most
of the work branded as Cloud efforts are actually conversion of existing
desktop software to SaaS. Especially, if you search keywords “Cloud” and
“Analytics”, you will see many analytics tools as SaaS. Although I believe
every type of Cloud effort is a brick in the wall while constructing a whole
Cloud environment, I think we should start distinguishing what Cloud effort is
made “for” cloud and what Cloud effort is made by “facilitating” Cloud. So if I
have to give an example, if you convert a management software to a SaaS
application, then you are “facilitating” Cloud. If this management software is
used to manage your Cloud resources, then this is an effort made “for” Cloud.
Although there is a considerable gray area in the intersection of the both, I
hope the example makes itself clear to the reader.
Where does Gravitant stand at this intersection? First of all, Gravitant is an
established Cloud brokerage company which is enlisted by Gartner’s recent report on Cloud brokerage companies. NIST
defines a cloud broker as
“…an entity that manages the use, performance and delivery of cloud services
and negotiates relationships between cloud providers and cloud consumers.” In
the light of this definition, Gravitant’s CloudMatrix and CloudWiz tools manage all traditional IT
resources and Cloud resources end to end from sourcing to provisioning and
monitoring. They include very powerful and intelligent capacity planning,
advanced monitoring and advanced analytics tools which enable enterprises to
strategically and tactically plan capacity of their IT resources on the Cloud
and in-house in addition to efficiently analyzing huge data collected from the
resources and proposing the most effective Cloud Analytics solutions. All these
efforts are made for Cloud to make Cloud a more manageable and less costly
environment for IT needs of enterprises.
On the other side, Gravitant’s major Cloud brokerage and
management tools CloudMatrix andCloudWiz are ultimate user friendly, fast and
smart SaaS applications. They naturally run on the Cloud very efficiently,
reliably and securely. Gravitant runs all its other applications and internal
IT resources on the Cloud. So Gravitant facilitates the Cloud and has the
first-hand Cloud experience as a Cloud user.
Gravitant both adds value to the Cloud and uses it for its own
benefit. All these Cloud centric activites make Gravitant a pure Cloud company.
Gravitant’s Cloud network grows very fast day by day including Amazon, Terremark, Savvis, Rackspace, IBM, etc.
There is a lot to learn about Gravitant’s cloud experience. If you have any
ideas, thoughts or questions to add to this discussion of what is “for” cloud
and what is “facilitating” cloud, please respond to this post or contact us so
that we can share the intellectual part of the Cloud experience together.
