Cloud Connections: Cloud 'Super Panel' – Here’s What They Said

Las Vegas – When you have a (very large) group of speakers as senior and as knowledgeable as those assembled for the afternoon keynote at the Cloud Connections show here, it’s probably best to let them speak for themselves. So we did. Check out what they had to say about the evolution of the cloud and how it will impact IT and business:

Ric Telford, vice president-cloud services, IBM, on cloud as the evolution of IT:

“The first thing you need to do is position this as part of a journey you are already on,” Telford said. “It’s the logical progression of the evolution of IT. You probably already have a good virtualization plan in place, a standardization plan in place. Selectively look at the workloads and figure out what would make sense to use a public cloud service provider [for].”

“The end goal of standardization is really to get to the platform as a standard layer. And then the more that standardizes the less you care about it. What you do then is just write your app and deploy it out. That’s what you really want to get to.”

Peder Ulander, chief marketing officer, Cloud.com, on cloud and open source:

“In many ways, it starts with table stakes: how do you engage with the right developers and right platforms to drive this new shift in IT services,” Ulander said. “All of the world’s largest cloud’s today have been built on open source. I think we’re going to see more and more of that from large and small companies. [It’s] enabling a faster spin in technology driving innovation.”

John Stetic, vice president of product marketing, Novell, on identity and the cloud:

“Where things start to knit together is at the application level, but more fundamentally where it gets knitted together is at the identity level. Identity management becomes really essential to bring the cloud into your organization at a software-as-a-service level,” Stetic said. While identity is key for cloud applications, a well-thought out management strategy is essential for hybrid cloud environments combing private and public clouds, he said. “That whole integration is almost like a nirvana; you can have your own resources and [reach out] for more resources outside in the cloud. How can you build the right type of management infrastructure to allow your business units or application teams to be able to consume that infrastructure and deploy out [cloud] resources?”

Reza Malekzadeh, vice president of marketing, Nimbula, on the cloud driving rapid change:

“For the first time internal IT has real competition,” Malekzadeh said, meaning that developers no longer are willing to wait six weeks for their internal IT department to provision a server for a new project. Instead, “in ten minutes and for ten dollars they can get a trial going” on a public cloud service at Google or Amazon.

Steve Riley, CTO, Riverbed Technologies (formerly of Amazon Web Services), on “fake” versus real cloud automation:

Saying he’s heard the same story a dozen times in the last three months, Riley said IT departments need to be sure that in trying to control the cloud they don’t just re-introduce bureaucracy. “The guy who used to rack and stack servers will now turn up your cloud instance. You need to call him up,” he described hearing, adding after a beat: “And it still takes about six weeks…I worry about that.”

Ryan O’Hara, Senior Director System Center Product Management, Microsoft, on standardization driving the cloud:

“What [people are] asking for typically is: I want some of the ability I see in commerical cloud services [like Facebook] and I want the economic promises [of cloud] I read about in the magazines,” O’Hara said. “That’s not achieved without a draconian approach to standardization and process control. That’s what happens in the public cloud. [Cloud providers] have automated as much of the processes and simplified as many of those processes as they can.”