In March, Tom Fisher, of SuccessFactors, was a guest speaker at Cloud Connect in Santa Clara. During his chat with M.R. Rangaswami, of Sand hill Group, he stated unequivocally that private cloud computing was simply a data center and that SaaS was cloud computing.
The problem with that statement is that it isn't completely wrong. Many organizations have a data center footprint and house servers on which they install software that is used throughout the organization; this is an application provided as a service, or, if we stretch a bit, SaaS (it's a stretch in my mind because there is no notion of multi-tenancy). Logically, then, if SaaS is cloud computing, and it is software that is installed on a server that is housed in the organization's data center, the organization is making use of a private cloud. To use Tom's analogy, "If it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, it's a duck." But I digress...
Back to the issue at hand. By itself, server virtualization is not cloud computing. However, if the organization were to automate the rapid provisioning and de-provisioning of the virtual resources using whatever home-grown, open source, or COTS middleware, then the organization is leveraging cloud computing on its own infrastructure--a private cloud. Server virtualization allows the organization to more efficiently utilize its servers' capacity whereas cloud computing increases the organization's agility, ability to rapidly test and deploy services to meet varying demand needs, and reduce its appetite for capital. Whether the infrastructure is around the world or in the organization's own data center is irrelevant.
Quack, quack!
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