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Watch out for news release from Virtual Machine Company next week.

Virtual Machine Company Webinar Recording and download

One of our partner companies 360IS recorded a Virtual Machine Company seminar is which is now available for download. For details of the agenda and material covered please see the original invite here.

Visionary analysts over-egg Cloud adoption

If we're not going to own any infrastructure in 5 years, how come the latest surveys suggest that only 5% of organisations polled have plans to go Cloud.

I suspect that Garnet, IDC et al are still overstating the situation when they say that 40% of organisations are using 'Cloud' today. It is more that many are using SaaS applications, managed email, as well as off-site Storage & Disaster Recovery.

I work with plenty of organisations who are delivering ICT as a service and referring to it as 'Internal Cloud' and many more who use Virtual Private Clouds to centralise their companies business applications they use a mix of their own equipment in colocated datacentres and mash up of SaaS applications, like Salesforce.com and hosted email/exchange services.

Don;t get me wrong I think that the future for much of IT is in the use of 3rd party services and organisations will be pragmatic adopting new "Cloudy" services as they become cost effective and add value to/remove costs from their businesses. But, franky I don;t see Millions of businesses dumping their IT in the next 2 years do you?

I have often thought that the true value of industry forecasting and punditry is to make astrology look respectable...

Clouds over London Evaporating

As co-location requirements soar providers are struggling to keep up with demand.
New data from TeleGeography’s Colocation Database reveal that colocation service providers are struggling to keep up with demand. Despite significant new construction, colocation site capacity is more constrained in 2010 than it was in 2009. More than 41% of sites surveyed by TeleGeography were at least 80% full at mid-2010, up from 34% of sites a year earlier.

Among the worst hit areas are London and the South of England, where surging power costs and a squeeze on physical space are causing colocation costs to rocket.

Plug into your local Cloud

At the turn of the 20th century most big businesses owned their own power sources. It was very expensive, increasing the business costs dramatically and the ability/inability to generate power became limiting to the growth of business generally. Which was bad for the economy; as we all know that increased business costs effect the cost of the product to the consumer. If the cost of the product is too high then it won't sell and the business will fail. The solution was clearly a shared power resource - a main power plant that could rent power a piece at a time to the business, hence the creation of the electric companies. A positive spin off was the wide adoption of power to the home and the eventual arrival of home working.

Cloud computing offers the same type of service to businesses and people at home. There is no longer a need for a business or organisation to front the cost of building or maintaining their own data centres, because now you can rent a moment in time to perform the processing you need, and pay for what you use - that's why power companies are helping Cloud providers design their billing systems.

Orange joins Cisco, EMC, VMware to form cloud computing alliance

In what is clearly the biggest news story of the week it's reported today that Orange Business Systems, the network service provider and mobile operator, is to provide the billing know-how for the 'pay as you go' cloud offering from the increasingly borg'd industry triumvirate of Cisco, EMC and VMware.

The Flexible 4 Business Alliance expands on the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition that Cisco, EMC and VMware established early last year and allows them to deliver complete Cloud Solutions.

EMC has clearly learned some valuable lessons from the closure of it's Atmos Cloud service in July this year:

1) If you make hardware that allows people to build Clouds, stick to the knitting.

2) Work with people you trust to deliver integrated offering - it's an open secret EMC & Cisco are engaged.

3) You need specialist expertise to collect the money - Like Amazon, Orange has extremely efficient microbilling capability

I predict this will be a great success amongst Global organisations and governments who want their own private cloud infrastructures, and for service providers looking for a one stop shop for the delivery of what will become core infrastructure.

European IT Managers cool about Cloud

In February this year Computer Associates released an interesting report titled ‘Unleashing the Power of Virtualisation 2010_Cloud Computing and the Perceptions of European Business’ rather long title but actually a very interesting survey I would recommend downloading a copy from here. The survey covered the attitudes to virtualisation and cloud computing at 550 IT managers in 14 European countries with 65% of those surveyed having over 3000 employees and the remainder between 1000 and 3000.

After several readings of the results conclusions I would draw is that the growing confidence that is coming from the rapid and successful rollout of virtualisation projects is pulling the Cloud concept up the adoption curve very quickly. Evidenced by the fact that was only 17% of European IT managers identified “Cloud Computing” has been transformational to their business 47% of them are adopting cloud type delivery models for internal ICT services.

It is quite clear that the delivery of internal Cloud environments facilitated by increasingly robust virtualisation technologies is seen by European IT managers as a way of regaining control of the corporate computer environment thereby forcing down runaway IT costs that are widely acknowledged as a drag on the bottom line.