| By Suresh Sambandam |
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| June 15, 2010 09:45 AM EDT |
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9,195 |
I was on a LinkedIn thread titled ‘How cloud computing is different from SaaS‘ where Rick Chapman who runs SoftLetter and SaaS University went on beating on this question ‘What is a private cloud’?
It is definitely worth it given the tremendous amount of confusion in the term ‘Cloud’ in general and ‘Private Cloud’ in particular. The motivation for this post is Rick and supported by a tweet I read around the same time from ‘Carl Brooks‘ who is a technology writer on Cloud at TechTarget. Let me give it a shot.
First, Cloud is about leveraging economies of scale whether it is public or private. Large companies like Citi Bank, P&G, Unilever, Pfizer have the economies of scale to create an equivalent of ‘Amazon EC2′ within the corporate network.When most people refer to ‘Private Cloud’ they are thinking about Virtualization.
Private Cloud != Virtualization.
To me,
Cloud = Virtualization + Automated & Managed Provisioning + Integrated Billing
If you have this type of infrastructure inside your corporate network then you can proudly call you have a ‘Private Cloud’. However, most companies are using Virtualization – at least all the large ones – and I see some of them say they are already in Cloud during the networking sessions @ conferences. Just doing Virtualiztion alone does not qualify to be called as Private Cloud!
If and when the ‘Data Center’ in enterprise IT, starts offering services to various internal departments and divisions (IT and/or Business), the same way Amazon EC2 does for public customers, with a fully managed provisioning, integrated billing leading to pay for what you use then they can call themselves ‘Private Cloud’. If you are small company running 25 servers, all you can do is Virtualization – not ‘Private Cloud’
I know this is not going to end here. Preparing myself to tackle the attacks…. :-) !
After an initial entrepreneurial stint for three years at the age of 19, Suresh Sambandam went on to work at Hewlett-Packard. Later, Suresh joined Selectica and rose to senior position, as Director of e-Insurance product division in a short-span. The e-Insurance division and its products were later acquired by Accenture. Suresh is a technocrat specializing in product engineering with expertise in software architecture for complex enterprise applications, inference engines, configuration engines, rule-based computing and enterprise middleware. He has applied for multiple patents. Suresh is passionate about entrepreneurship, technology startups and spends a significant amount of personal time in the start-up ecosystem in Chennai. Suresh is a member of the National Council for Emerging Companies Forum and also a core committee member of Product Forum at NASSCOM. He also does mentoring for budding entrepreneurs at IIT Bombay, E-Cell. Suresh is a regular speaker at various industry forums & academic institutions.
Suresh is the Founder & CEO of OrangeScape. OrangeScape is a platform (PaaS - Platform as a Service) to develop process oriented business applications that can be deployed "On Cloud" and "On Premise". OrangeScape supports platforms like Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure as cloud deployment option and Microsoft .Net and J2EE as on-premise deployment options. OrangeScape has 50+ customers including global brands like Unilever, Citibank, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Fullterton, etc. OrangeScape in the only Indian company has been featured in the PaaS research reports of Forrester and Gartner. OrangeScape has been featured as 'India's Rising Tech Stars' by Forbes(US) magazine. OrangeScape was showcased as one of the 3 emerging product companies in India by Nasscom and was also awarded 'Top IT Innovations' for 2 consecutive years.
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