Public cloud market "people coming and going"

Remember that Dell promised to launch a public cloud based on Openstack this year? Well, it won't come. On May 20, Dell announced that it would abandon public cloud projects and instead sell public cloud solutions based on Joyent, ScaleMatrix, and ZeroLag, and concentrate on the private cloud.

Someone left the room and others made up for it. A day later, VMware announced plans for how it would compete with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and RackSpace in the public cloud market. This is a formal statement made by VMware after all kinds of rumors and speculations in the industry.

Plus, Google recently made two big steps in cloud computing at the I/O conference: IaaS service Compute Engine supports hybrid cloud, PaaS service App Engine supports PHP, and Microsoft Azure landed in China, we see and What is felt is the popularity and fierceness of the public cloud market. Therefore, “people coming and going” will be the norm.

Dell favors private cloud

"The private cloud business is Dell's bread and butter." In the face of all doubts, Nnamdi Orakwue, Dell's vice president of cloud computing, made no secret of his love of "new love."

Why did Dell make such a big adjustment in the cloud computing strategy within half a year, directly discarding "old love"? The reason given by Dell is: "Dell has found that customers do not want to be locked in to a cloud provider and hope to get it. 'The workload can be moved if necessary' guarantee."

Dell's abandonment of the public cloud is something to be found - two weeks before the announcement of the matter, Dell acquired Enstratius, a startup that Gartner considered to be the most innovative. It was founded in 2008 and provides single or multiple cloud management capabilities. Applications managed by Enstratius can come from private, public, and hybrid clouds, enabling applications to provide automation, scaling management, application configuration management, usage management, and cloud utilization monitoring.

"Given Dell's current ownership of Enstratius, it makes sense to abandon public cloud, they will not focus on being a single cloud service provider. Dell chose a two-pronged strategy - can provide customers with multiple cloud service providers The product, but if there isn't one that suits it, Dell is also good at selling Enstratius management software," wrote one IT person in a blog comment.

Indeed, Dell is also quite confident about the capabilities of Enstratius. "Enstratius can support managing more than 20 different cloud services," Nnamdi Orakwue stressed. The cloud that Enstratius can manage includes the products of almost all major cloud computing companies today, such as Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft, and Google. There is no doubt that Enstratius has become the core of Dell's cloud strategy.

Forrester’s cloud computing industry observer James Dayten believes that Dell’s consolidation of Enstratius within less than a month is a good thing for Dell. The attractiveness of Dell's new cloud strategy to customers is reflected in Enstratius' ability to deploy resources freely across multiple clouds.

How can Dell, which has undergone active transition, get rid of the "problems" of hardware providers when it comes to providing IaaS? Enthusiastic insiders have given the following suggestions: "Don't alienate independent IaaS customers because of competition in the enterprise business; Value-added IaaS, not storage and computing; creating business processes and delivering value, rather than simply increasing capacity and computing power; creating App stores to increase IaaS value, and connecting to the outside world through APIs."

VMware and partners business

Here, VMware is introducing all the details of its plans to launch a public cloud product, which is a core part of VMware's new hybrid cloud strategy.

Brandon Butler, the author of the technology media Network World, said that VMware has shown that it is trying to increase its efforts in the cloud, and the company's growth and cloud closely linked.

"VMware had previously advertised itself as a partner-centric company, but with its latest strategy, its previous arguments seemed a bit untenable." Brandon Butler revealed that one from VMware People actually admitted that the company may directly compete with some "beloved partners" and may also provide new opportunities for some manufacturers.

In the eyes of the outside world, VMware occupies an excellent position in the cloud computing market and also occupies one of the most unstable positions. It has valuable "fixed assets" at the management level of the data center, but this kind of governance Status is slowly being eroded. Virtualization software gives VMware the opportunity to provide customers with a common platform to connect on-premise VMware management software and VMware’s upcoming public cloud.

VMware emphasizes that IT personnel use the same cloud as their local counterparts when using their home cloud. But what VMware needs to prove is the value of the universal management platform it provides to users. You know, it's not that it's exclusive doing this. For example, Microsoft is very proud that Office applications can be deployed locally, and can also be extended on Azure.

There is also an issue that cannot be avoided - how to deal with the relationship with partners. Currently, more than 100 companies such as Verizon Terremark have used vCloud Director in their public cloud, which means that customers actually have a common management platform in technology. The unique feature of VMware's public cloud is that it is provided directly by VMware, not a third-party partner.

"We are not competing with vCloud Director partners," explains Angelos Qutas, product marketing manager for VMware Cloud Services. But he must admit that the overlap of customers is inevitable.

"The cake is big enough." According to Angelos Qutas, vCloud Director partners can win differentiated competitive advantages by cater to specific vertical industries or provide packaged services.

Who can then laugh

"The public cloud burns money and the private cloud makes money," said Mao Xinsheng, CTO of the IBM China Development Center. "The launch of the public cloud is to shape the brand, and profitability is the foundation of the company. This explains Dell's withdrawal and VMware's entry. "Indeed, Dell's current fiscal situation urgently requires Dell to make a profit, and VMware, relying on virtualization technology, has made a lot of money and it is time to build its brand influence."

In fact, after Dell said byebye, VMware said the first few weeks of hello, the public cloud market has been turbulent: After downgrading public cloud prices, Rackspace's earnings were lower than expected, and then the company's stock price has dropped by about 25%. Google officially announced the opening of the public cloud. And giants such as Amazon, is a company like Dell can currently not compete effectively with it, because it is limited by the cost and the required resources. "This kind of project can only be afforded by larger suppliers. Building a cloud computing infrastructure is a game, and this game means large-scale and rich resources," said Ales Williams, Techcrunch's columnist.

What is even more frightening is that these manufacturers have begun to fight the price war. "Compared to the version that was launched on its platform for the first time 7 years ago, Amazon's service today has been reduced to 1/20 or more in price." Google, Rackspace also did not hesitate to participate in low-cost killing. .

"Google didn't try to replace Microsoft or Windows developers. They are not trying to replace Rackspace," said Forrester analyst Dave Bartonelli. "It has to compete directly with Amazon for pricing and capacity." Of course, Amazon's time in the cloud Longer than Google, both companies suffer from a lack of user awareness and support. However, Google has a huge platform advantage of search engines that can make it a powerful competitor in the cloud computing market.

“Actually, the business model of public cloud is not clear, and most cloud service providers rely on traffic support.” Mao Xinsheng pointed out that Rackspace “passes harder” and Amazon’s AWS is a typical value overflow. It makes full use of e-commerce resources, and Google will rely on other businesses to support its public cloud services. How to develop the public cloud market needs to wait and see.

Related Links

Public cloud is a big cake According to a public cloud research report released by Gartner, in 2013, the global public cloud service market is expected to grow by 18.5%, with a total revenue of 131 billion US dollars, compared with last year's total global revenue of 111 billion US dollars. Included in the public cloud service category are infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) such as Amazon, OpenStack-based public cloud, and cloud-based co-broadcast services.

Public cloud IaaS, as well as files and storage, are the fastest-growing parts of public cloud services. In 2012 alone, it had a scale of US$6.1 billion, a growth rate of 42.4%. It is expected that the growth rate in 2013 will reach 47.3% and the market size will reach 9 billion U.S. dollars.