AKIBIA'S PRACTICAL GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Sky High Cloud Chatter
Cloud Computing continues to be one of the top trends in terms of discussion and chatter in 2009. Many analyst firms are predicting that spending on cloud computing will far out pace spending in other IT sectors as the economy continues to recover. Forrester Research states that cloud computing should be on every enterprise’s three year roadmap. Not surprisingly, many IT vendors are announcing their own Cloud Computing solutions.
Today’s announcement from Cisco, EMC and VMware is another example of vendors repositioning existing products for the cloud. Still, while not revolutionary more of these collaborative partnerships will be needed to truly create a cloud-ready IT environment. It’s likely that this partnership between Cisco and EMC is largely a result of the fact that the two companies alone do not have the products and scope to compete effectively against cloud offerings from HP and IBM. While that might be true, it is also true that partnerships amongst best of breed products providers—including networking, storage and virtualization technologies- but also vendors providing WAN optimization and other solutions, will ultimately create a true cloud computing environment. We need more collaboration like this, rather than repackaging of existing solutions as "cloud ready."
