It seems that not a day goes by without another cloud-related update in the hosting industry. While there is general consensus within the industry on the taxonomy of cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), and there is some public market sizing/forecasting on cloud services by the good folks at IDC, I have not seen much discussion on the key components of enabling a cloud service.
To that end, I have put together the following illustration to represent my point of view. Below the dotted line is the physical layer and above the line is the virtual layer (pun intended), or more specifically the cloud software layer. I see four critical software components needed to enable a cloud service: virtualization, provisioning/automation, billing, and self-service.
What do you think?
About Joshua Beil
Joshua Beil (@joshbeil) is the Director of Market Strategy and Research for Parallels, the leading provider of automation and virtualization software to the web hosting community. Previously, Josh was the Director of Social Media & Technology at a Level 3 Communications [Nasdaq: LVLT] where he provided strategic and tactical sales support. Before that, Josh was CEO and cofounder of Skywave Broadband, Inc, the largest commercial WiFi service provider in Hawaii. He was named one of Pacific Business News' Forty Under 40 for 2006, and in 2005, he was named a High Tech Leader by the Pacific Technology Foundation. Before co-founding Skywave, Mr. Beil was VP of Research and Development for the market research boutique, Tier 1 Research, where he covered the Internet infrastructure sector as an analyst, and negotiated and sold subscriptions to Tier 1's research services. Josh has also previously served as the Senior Analyst for Exodus Communications as well as the internationally known market research firm, IDC. He holds a Certificate in E-Business from UCSC Extension, and he graduated with honors from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a major in Psychology.
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