Is Rogers taking aim at Bell and Telus?

Seems that Rogers is taking a page from Bell and Telus' playbook... While Bell and Telus were busy trying to out position each other in the data centre market, Rogers picked up 3 data centre service providers: BlackIron earlier this year, and now Pivot and Granite.

What's interesting here is that Rogers instantly gains a significant foot hold in the enterprise data centre and hosting market but also gains cloud computing capabilities via the Granite acquisition. One wonders if Rogers is moving into the enterprise managed services market and making a play for the lucrative long term hosting and services contracts that Bell and Telus have enjoyed for so long.

Recall that both Bell and Telus launched their cloud infrastructure products last year, which were really underwhelming as product offerings, and, as far as anyone can tell, haven't really gained much traction in the market. Probably because their respective IaaS offerings were marketed to increase demand for that oh-so-precious-commodity-with steadily-eroding-profit-margins: bandwidth. How's that working out now?

The questions now, are:

• Will Rogers use the same tactic and try to use the DC and IaaS offerings to drive bandwidth sales?
• Will Rogers use it to promote and grow a user community that will serve the ever-growing-with-steady-margins mobile market?
• Will Rogers use this foothold to drive managed services sales?

Time will tell. But the Telecom market is heating up!

The Great Cloud Divide

It has been interesting to watch the evolution of cloud computing over the past few years. It has morphed from the X-as-a-service model to include "cloud based services", those services that are offered in a hosted model; it has been extended, to cloudwash those services that don't even remotely qualify; and now it is showing signs of speciation in that major players are aligning to one flavour or another.

We are speaking, of course, about alignment on open source vs. proprietary software, one vendor vs. another and the alliances that interconnect or separate them.

Open sourcing one's software suite has been a proven method to increase the use of software and generate revenue through services. Typically, this has been done by offering a pared down version of the software and holding back some features for a paid premium version. Red Hat showed that this is a feasible business model and has come a long way since its early days to offer a free version and a supported version.

Interestingly, Citrix open sourced CloudStack and committed to continue development of CloudStack with the community on the open source version. The only supposed difference between CloudStack and CloudPlatform? The logo.

Citrix also partnered with AWS to "...seamlessly connect corporate data centres to Amazon Web Services..." and, given the fact that AWS also partnered with Eucalyptus, this is a safe bet that AWS is building a community around hybrid cloud deployments.

Now VMware has acquired Nicira, a virtual network infrastructure software vendor, who has strong ties to OpenStack. Is this VMware's response to Citrix's moves in cloud computing? VMware certainly does not appear to be making moves to open source vCloud Director so it would stand to reason that they would lean towards an open source competitor of CloudStack's to counter Citrix. It certainly seem that lines have been drawn in the sand.

In all of this kerfuffle, there have been questions about what AWS plans to do. As mentioned, AWS is banking on growing its business by reaching out to private cloud customers and integration of their provider's products. This much is obvious from the Eucalyptus and Citrix partnerships. Therefore the likely outcome is the status quo, one that would be favored by most. The other possible outcome is that AWS open sources its products. I don't pretend to know what outcome could possible look like but I suspect that the likelihood is fairly low given the revenue streams AWS has built over the years.

So, it appears we have serious competition between VMware and Citrix for all things cloud. At first blush, it appears that Citrix may have the upper hand by aligning itself with AWS "early on". It is probably only a matter of time before VMware makes similar moves.

Adding to this complexity, Microsoft and Cisco are in the wings looking to make a mark with their own products. Of the two Microsoft may be better positioned to gain market share against all comers due to the fact that it has a full suite of market leading products that are already offered in a SaaS model and that may be deliverable in a SaaS model in a private environment in the near future as well.