NaviSite sponsored, presented at, had a large booth and employee participation at Cloud Expo 2010. It was held at the Javits convention center in NYC this week. The show was lively and widely attended with vendors and enterprise corporate IT teams coming from around the world.
I had great conversations with many corporate IT personnel that were either just starting their cloud research or just wrapping it up and writing recommendations for their path forward. It struck me that there seems to be several categories that predict an enterprises current propensity to move to the cloud. First and foremost are their comfort levels with a particular technology and their overall philosophy and consideration of the outsource model. Simply stated enterprises that have a portion – large or small of their infrastructure virtualized are more likely already experimenting or about to transition portions of their IT applications and infrastructure to the cloud.
In my conversations it seemed that companies that have published plans for the lifecycle of their applications both in-house developed and 3rd party – have already reviewed the opportunity or already virtualizing the deployment of these applications. As corporate IT reviews these applications for upgrading, replacing or simply running them in a more efficient model – the cloud is now part of the roadmap.
Cloud Expo also gave me some in-person visibility into the innovation that is occurring in the rapidly maturing and solidifying cloud space. There are many new vendors that have launched new software, hardware and services around the new world of the cloud. Examples include new control panels, onboarding models, security solutions, governance implementation and tracking systems and much more. I can honestly say that the hosting industry is truly going through a revolutionary period – it’s not just evolution of existing technology. We can all look forward to new ways to innovate and meet our customer’s requirements for greater flexibility, reliability and a better return on their IT investments.
While the big public clouds – ie. clouds that anyone with a credit card can signup for, have done a wonderful job at demonstrating the power, flexibility and appropriateness of the cloud – these public clouds are not seen as a good home or final resting place for enterprise IT applications. Corporate IT understands the complexity of the cloud service provider’s infrastructure – and is looking for a cloud provider that can guarantee a level of security, reliability and customization that a full managed cloud services environment can provide. A single VM or cloud server is not what corporate IT is looking for.
The Cloud Expo event also served as a launch vehicle for NaviSite’s enterprise cloud based services, which are offered with guaranteed infrastructure and application SLAs, predictable usage-based pricing and are delivered on our enterprise-class, highly available, scalable and secure application-focused NaviCloud platform. We had extremely positive feedback from both customers and prospects that attended the show and saw live demo’s of our NaviCloud management interface. 2010 really is turning into the first full year of viable managed cloud services environments.
