By annie shum | June 15, 2009
Going forward, IBM cloud computing software chief Kristof Kloeckner sees the industry moving to a mixture of private clouds, public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, and shared private clouds. The latter category is like the Amazon model, but involves a small number of customers who share the same infrastructure but have separate networks using VPNs.
One challenge is ensuring interoperability among different clouds, allowing workloads to move from one cloud to another. This will require the establishment of open standards. Although vendors are working together to develop these standards, customers have limited flexibility in today’s market. “The movement of services and applications, and combination of applications only works if all the providers adhere to a common set of standards and interfaces,” Kloeckner says. “We aren’t starting from zero. We’ve gained a lot of experience in the industry from working with competitors in the context of Web services standards and service-oriented architectures. I believe we can build on that.”
But, “in general we are not quite there yet,” Kloeckner adds. Public cloud providers base their services on various virtual machine models, but these VM images aren’t totally compatible. Data exchange, security and how to manage services across different cloud platforms are also important questions, he notes. Authenticating and identifying users in a federated environment will be difficult.
In the meantime, Kloeckner says cloud opportunities for customers are real, but it’s still early. Whether looking at private or public clouds, clients are typically starting out with non-differentiating applications that could be operated more efficiently, he says. While declining to specifically discuss future IBM technology, Kloeckner indicated that many new cloud products and services are on the way. He predicted that cloud-based analytics products and developer services will be important. “We certainly will continue to support our clients to build private clouds, so you will see us showcase more supporting infrastructure,” Kloeckner says.
“You will see us focusing on the interconnection between private and public clouds, and you will see us release more purpose-built infrastructure in support of clouds. We feel the economics of private clouds are compelling in the enterprise, and the combination of private and public clouds looks very attractive.”
By Jon Brodkin 04:09 PM ET
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