How do you sell private cloud?

Andrew Buss identifies potential ways to move customers along the path from virtualisation to automation and more agile business IT

The term "private cloud" has been widely promoted by IT vendors as the natural future of IT. Much of the associated collateral assumes that companies both understand and have an intrinsic need for a complete private cloud. However, our research indicates that very few companies actually set out with such a vision.

Most look to improve short-term, acute pain points, such as a lack of agility or performance. While private cloud vendors are going all out to get partners to sell complete private cloud solutions, such an all-encompassing message and approach will likely find limited traction.

This is not to say that the concept of private cloud is applicable only to leading-edge companies. When we look at what many companies are doing to improve the relevance of IT to the business and the service being delivered, many combine elements that form the building blocks of private cloud.

So what is private cloud in the first place? The basic idea is to pool a group of servers and other storage and networking resources, creating a general-purpose platform on which a variety of workload types can be run simultaneously.

An important attribute of private cloud is the rapid allocation and de-allocation of workload resources, enabling more dynamic management. Put to a range of IT professionals in a survey, most agreed -- although few had actually implemented it and many had only cursory knowledge.

Such a survey will be biased towards those with an interest in the topic; it will likely over- state the number.

So we then looked at whether the respondents were running private clouds themselves. A chunk said they were, although this number is likely overstated due to self-selection. Many, however, are not running private clouds as strictly defined above.

So just what are they doing? For those in early-stage virtualisation, it is about getting on top of managing the virtual machines as they execute. It is also about getting more information on the resources being used on virtual platforms, as running multiple OSes and workloads on shared hardware introduces additional complexity.

Focus on incremental capabilities

The most pressing investments for highly virtualised environments are in general operations management and getting to grips with service management. Longer-term road maps include automated workload and provisioning. As virtualisation increases and infrastructure becomes more dynamic, the focus will broaden to include improving the quality of service and adding specific tools to manage the library of virtual-machine images that are available for deployment.

But probably the most important area for improving the agility and responsiveness of IT is the move to policy-based provisioning and workload management, ideally coupled with the ability to automate it to some level.

With our research highlighting the fact that formal plans to invest in private cloud are likely to be few and far between, the best approach to selling private cloud may therefore be to not try to sell it as private cloud.

Instead, figure out where the customer is on the journey through virtualisation to automation and private cloud, and what business needs they serve. Identify opportunities in the form of incremental capabilities that can be implemented quickly with reduced risk. This should fit more easily into natural budget cycles and allocation - whereas a private cloud project per se might mean a much harder fight to get approval.

Andrew Buss is service director and analyst at Freeform Dynamics