One of the more interesting sessions at Gartner Symposium yesterday was on "Cloud Computing: Changing the Vendor Landscape." Gartner Analysts David Cearley and David Mitchell Smith predicted that by 2013, only two vendors will be perceived as leaders in both cloud computing and enterprise computing. Those two vendors are likely to be Microsoft and VMware, they said.
Smith noted that the companies seen today as enterprise computing leaders, such as SAP and Oracle, aren't seen as cloud computing leaders; and cloud leaders, such as Amazon, Salesforce, and Google, aren't seen as enterprise leaders. Over time, they say this will change.
In their view, the cloud computing continuum moves from closed private cloud implementations to full open public ones, with lots of things in between, which include managed private clouds, virtual private clouds, and community private clouds (shared by a few companies).
They said that cloud services exist in a value chain, and that it will result in more interesting connections between the various vendors. But they were also clear that putting IBM Websphere or an Oracle database on top of an infrastructure platform such as Amazon EC2 is not creating a cloud-based service; it's just another way of hosting applications.
They then went through the major cloud players and talked about their pros and cons. They discussed which ones were providers of cloud services (where companies can buy services) and which were enablers (which create technology, but others create the services); which layers of cloud services (infrastructure, platform, and applications) the companies offer products for; and whether the vendors support public or private clouds, or both. Here's a summary.
They went through each of the vendors, in most cases, pointing out the pros and cons of their offerings and where they fell short of a full solution. Overall, they say only Microsoft and VMware have full lines, although their offerings are very different from each other.
Smith said Microsoft's choices were "insanely complex" as it offered all sorts of products in all sorts of ways. It is an enabler of cloud services within companies, a provider of its own services, and also sells services through third parties. It has products for both public and private clouds, and it offers lots of SaaS applications (some hosted, some really cloud-based, and some moving in the cloud direction), and its Azure products, which offer a hybrid of infrastructure and platform as a service.
Microsoft has "one of the most visionary and complete views of the cloud," Cearley said. In some respects, he said, in a few years, you may think of their enterprise offerings as private versions of their cloud offerings. On the other side, he said, many of the specific offerings aren't fully mature yet. But Smith noted that software moves faster on the cloud.
VMware, on the other hand, is not trying to be a provider -- just an enabler, Smith said. It has been focused on private clouds, but with things like Springsource and Zimbra, it is taking on more public cloud attributes. Smith said most of the company's products are typically not offered "as a service." But he lauded the company's comprehensive strategy focus, and Cearley talked about breadth of enabling technologies and working with lots of providers who will deliver the services.
Overall, they said to look at a number of offerings from both established and up-and-coming vendors; to expect a lot of consolidation in the space; and to look at "cloud service brokerages" to help companies transition to the cloud.
자료출처 ::: http://blogs.pcmag.com/miller/2010/10/gartner_will_microsoft_and_vmw.php