The hybrid cloud (private cloud where you're moving workloads between internal and external clouds) is on the roadmap of VMware. IMO it will take a decade to get there. Getting data into the cloud is one thing. Getting it back reliably and quickly is another. But there are many more significant issues, including visibility on performance, automation of data and application movement, security, policies, governance, backup and the list goes on.

The reality is the data center world is one big heterogeneous hairball that unfortunately cloud marketing hype will not unravel.

Don't get me wrong. I love VMware's vision. It's fresh, bold, ambitious and interesting. It's great for the industry to have such a lightning rod. It's just the reality is it can only touch a small subset of applications today and it will take many years for VCE and others to prove that this model can be applied broadly in the data center.

And in the meantime, companies such as IBM, HP, Oracle and Microsoft will perpetuate heterogeneity because of their strong relationships and proven track records. Customers won't risk those relationships without very careful consideration.

There might be a third option in there -- the "Hybrid Public-Private" cloud -- that mainly serves one customer, but also has capabilities to attend to a handful of trusted partners/clients.  

Or maybe the "cloud" will be even more amorphous than anyone suspects -- and everything will fall under a huge blanket cloud that encompasses any aspect of large scale computing.  And the cloud will just be defined by how it's used...

Thanks for the excellent post Mike. You are right...the new cloud players don't covet a data center presence-- at least not today. There's too much growth in the stratosphere to come down to earth. The traditional data center crowd on the other hand don't want to be left off the cloud marketing train. In fact the day after the Berkeley paper came out essentially dismissing the VDC as not cloud, the spin masters in the traditional world hit the streets to stake their claim in the cloud and attach the cloud moniker to their solutions.

David,

Your post was very insightful, and helped me gel what has been growing in my mind for a while now in the directions that the amorphous cloud seemed to be headed in.

I'm not sure that there are just two directions--time will tell that tale--but it is clear that the cloud announcements of the last year do seem to have two distinct rings to them--one is that any app or service from your data center could be moved into the cloud (a bold claim still) that has plodding progress by a few big players, and then a furious amount of activity by a bunch of new players that don't seem to be courting IT at all--in fact, they at times seem to be anti-corporate IT. This group has evolved into a set of ecosystems of their own.

The needs of the corporate data center, tasked with moving an app or service out of the data center into the cloud is different than that of the entrepeneur looking to build a service that would only be consumed from the cloud. The increased connectivity to a data center app afforded by the clould can both be a blessing, and a curse. The blessing could come in the form of increased access to the app by legitimate users remotely. These might be employees, or they might be "partners". The curse is that this is one more set of security nightmares for the IT wonks that can't even get us to change our passwords without draconian methods being employed.

If on the other hand, I'm building a service or application that take a set of loosely coupled servcies on a cloud-based bus--and the benefit of the application increases by having it be more openly available, then my needs are different.

I think the VCE Squad (insert your own lower case i) announcement is a key moment in the development of what David calls the private cloud. For in that world, clean interfaces, well understood and documented, make the transition easier for traditional "data center" applications--kind of like wrapping web services around a mainframe app to serve up a portion of browser integrated "page" sourcing data from multiple systems. Don't forget--Cisco UCS includes blade servers and host adapters for the fabric as well as the fabric itself. As David pointed out, IBM, Oracle, Hitachi, and the rest are all working their stories as well. The VCE announcement has some franchise names working in their favor; VMWare, EMC storage, and Cisco fabric and securty.

The Oracle postioning and product development/purchases about Grid and virtualization have been indicating their intent for quite awhile now. So I agree with you--they are to be watched--and for some, to be courted. Same with Dell, I would think.

Now that I see the new cloud for what it is, I can also see why the announcements are more frequent and more energetic. This is no longer an IT sell, this is appealing right to the parts of the business that are looking at creative ways of doing things that traditional IT by its very charter is ill-fitted to fulfill--linking us to Mary Shacklett's post on IT & Marketing cooperation.

I'm also curious to see what/if the new clould also begins to fragment as things go forward.

Hey Scott--the network really IS the computer...

Hi Gaja...Thanks for weighing in...I think we disagree on all points except that Hyper-V has great potential.

*IMO the data center will take a decade to get to a point where you can move stuff from private to public cloud and back securely...i.e. the definition of private cloud as put forth by EMC/VMware and Cisco. Public cloud is there today-- amazon, azure, google, salesforce, etc.

*Virtually all of VCE's major competitors have responded and are in defensive mode. They are threatened...it is crystal clear. For example...Cisco is now a server vendor with UCS with Intel's full support. It's clear intent is to capture share in application and database markets.

*IMO Oracle's acquistion of Virtual Iron, its pending ownership of Sun and its extremely strong position in database/middleware and applications puts in in a much better position than anyone to control how/when/where database-based applications get containerized.

*My point about the 'true cloud' versus the data center wannabees is they are two completely different worlds. The 'true cloud' vendors aren't going after the data center but clearly VMware covets the market being pursued by Google, Amazon et al.

So we disagree, right? That's what makes good blogs!

I think Virtual data center is where private cloud is going to mature and public cloud is still trying to define what it is.  VCE announcement may not be that bad for any other partners because VMWare, Cisco and EMC does not sell OS, Middleware, application servers or database servers.  So still there is a lot of money to go around.  It may rub Microsoft on their Hyper-V but MS is strongly positioned to grow in mid and small market's virtualiation.  Oracle due to Sun's acquisition may never be able to get their virtualization act out. 

On the flip side virtual data center maturity should make enterprises get comfortable on public cloud adoption.  I dont personally see this as two different camps competing, but collaborating for greater market share.

Interesting comments Terry. I'd say: 1) I think competitors will have to break more than a sweat. VCE has set up a JV, they are spending millions on test and integration, they are spending on a services infrastructure that is a single interface to clients. This is in the boring but important department. But non-trivial.

IBM can do it. HP can do it. Others can to..but EMC and Cisco are stacking the VMware deck in thier favor. I'd be a bit upsset if I were a big VMware partner.

Polarizing? EMC/VMware/Cisco just declared open war with IBM, HP, Oracle, Microsoft and several others. It had a big party and invited 3 major players and some non-IBM integrators.

Welcoming?

We've got Cisco, EMC and VMware adding a heavy dose of virtualization to the cloud equation, and then everybody else? Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, NetApp and Hitachi won't exactly have to break a sweat to match the capabilities here, right? Is this new 3-way alliance really so polarizing?