IDC Canada published its "IDC MarketScape: Canadian Dedicated Private infrastructure as a Service 2014 Vendor Assessment" earlier this year. The figure is the MarketScape from that report. Does anyone else see anything wrong with this picture?
Before I go any further:
- I have not had the opportunity read the IDC Marketscape report in its entirety and, as of this writing, have been limited to vendor articles and press releases. If anyone would like to send me a copy of the $15,000 document, I'd be more than happy to read it through and reconsider what you're about to read.
- In fairness, IDC's MarketScape has a methodology which states that the "...criteria selection, weightings, and vendor scores represent well-researched IDC judgement about the market and specific vendors."
Unfortunately, I think that IDC Canada missed the mark in their analysis because not everyone can be a leader. This is like saying that every athlete that participates in the Olympics finishes in first place. The simple fact that all the vendors included in the report are grouped in the top right hand corner of the MarketScape figure suggests that the criteria used probably don't differentiate between the vendors sufficiently.
I would assume that subsequent versions of this report will differentiate between the vendors and provide more valuable information for readers by providing more comparative and contrasting analysis of the various offerings.
A random white paper I read used the words, "...increase infrastructure ROI..." when discussing virtualization of servers. These words are not typically used in the context of cloud based services because everyone is so preoccupied with the benefits of using the public cloud.
In public cloud parlance, ROI us usually used in a comparison of the costs to buy infrastructure vs. the cost of using resources on demand in the cloud. In private cloud vocab, ROI means just that: return on investment. So, how does an organization "increase" the ROI for capital assets? By virtualizing and adopting cloud best practices for automated provisioning and deprovisioning-in other words, creating a private cloud. If usage of the asset is increased, then the return on the initial investment can be increased as well.
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!