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The Software as a Service (think Salesforce.com) and Infrastructure as a Service (think Amazon) markets are a big deal, but their younger sibling, Platform as a Service has still been a work in progress.

However, Gartner has just announced PaaS, too, is ready to join the party. In fact, the global PaaS market is set to more than double over the next four years, the analyst firm predicts. Worldwide platform as a service (PaaS) revenue is on pace to reach $1.2 billion in 2012, up from $900 million in 2011, according to Gartner, Inc. The market will experience consistent growth with worldwide PaaS revenue totaling 1.5 billion in 2013, and growing to $2.9 billion in 2016.

Big money, but still relatively small compared Gartner's prediction of $14.5 billion for SaaS this year.

What does Gartner mean by PaaS?  For that matter, what does anybody mean by PaaS? PaaS is a range of capabilities and services that encompass application infrastructure and middleware. It occurs as suites of application infrastructure services, integration platforms, as well as specialist application infrastructure services such as database platform as a service, business process management platform as a service, messaging as a service and other functional types of middleware offered as a cloud service. PaaS is emerging in both private cloud settings as well as public cloud services.

In terms of vendors, IBM and Microsoft -- large application infrastructure management vendors -- have the strongest positions in the PaaS space, but most of it is still up for grabs, Gartner says. Expect to see "more competitive landscape disruption over the next three years since many of the largest enterprise software vendors are on the cusp of entering the PaaS market with their own offerings." >>Read more

Source: ZDNet

The cloud market can be a big, daunting place. Seemingly every tech vendor has a cloud strategy, with new products and services dubbed "cloud" coming out every week. But who are the real market leaders? Research firm Gartner's answer lies in its Magic Quadrant report for the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market.

Unsurprisingly, Amazon Web Services is listed in the top, far-right corner, in the "leaders and visionaries" corner of the MQ.

Perhaps most surprising are companies NOT on Gartner's MQ. Missing from this list are big-name companies that have invested a lot in the cloud, including Microsoft, HP, IBM and Google. That may change in future years, though, as this MQ report only includes providers that had IaaS clouds in general availability as of June 2012. Microsoft, HP and Google had clouds in beta at the time.

Gartner only measured the top 15 cloud providers by estimated global market share, which left out others such as CloudSigma, FireHost, NaviSite and Peer 1, which Gartner mentions as having competitive and compelling offerings, but not top-15 global market share. Other providers appearing on the list in past years dropped because of the market share requirement included AT&T, Datapipe, Hosting.com, Tata Communications and Virtacore Systems.

To be included in this year's MQ, the provider must offer a stand-alone IaaS offering run across at least two data centers, complete with 24/7 customer support. Because of the focus on market share, the MQ report takes a more company- and market-dynamic approach to evaluating firms, rather than a pure look at the technical offerings of each company. It's a solid guide, though, and provides a basic who's who in the cloud. >>Read more

Source: NetworkWorld

Every now and then one often hears of a new terminology in the cloud platforms. As the industry grows by leaps and bounds, it is hardly necessary to expect nothing short of dramatic and innovative changes. In this wave of developments, the established companies bask in all the glory while the new fish in the pond try to surface to the ground. Still, the latter are providing an alternative platform that might be revolutionizing the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) scene by their open-ended technologies.

Before introducing the new giants in the field of IaaS that one may not be familiar with, it is important to give the perfect example of such a platform.

EC2

This is the quintessential platform in the IaaS circles, owned and partitioned by Amazon. It has many brainchildren in the industry that are specializing in any of its virtualization arms, such as, that of taking software as hardware to help feature two operating systems in one machine. However, its essence lies in making servers a cheap provision that companies need not count as part of their capital expenses. They only have to use the remote servers from the provider while keying in only the operational cost, not at a fixed fee but for as long as they use it. Talk about the wage system in the cloud infrastructure!

The other important but still obscure industry examples include the following three:

ENKI

It is a bet that many stakeholders in the industry may not be familiar with this provider of IaaS facilitation. It is a good ground for closeted organizations that want to begin their own independent datacenters that are both reliable and high-end. Just like many private cloud offerings, it has backup infrastructural provisions, which it does on a regular basis. It also comes with a definitive firewall that can safeguard a site’s activities against the outside world. Needless to say, it is as scalable as any other provision worthy of being a cloud offering.

Cloudscaling

This is not an unknown platform per se, but the fact is that it is more specialized in nature, attracting government bodies, organizations and other independent entities because it helps to make the cloud more open source. Its main goal is to offer a starting point for anybody who does not have resources for initiating their own personal cloud. Unlike before when IT departments had to search far and wide to look for a public provider, now they can effortlessly manage complicated software, hosting and safety models that their organizations demand using this infrastructure. This service is open-ended, and a good example of how to scale up an entity by remote means. >>Read more

Source: CloudTweaks

IT professionals who have learned to work across traditional borders are the hot ticket in the current cloud-crazy job market.

When David Grimes, CTO of managed and cloud service provider NaviSite, based in Andover, Mass., is looking to fill jobs at both the junior and senior level, he's not looking for folks who have stayed centered in a particular professional silo like application development, server management, network engineering or data storage.

Rather, he wants to hire someone who has trained across several of those IT disciplines.

"Moving forward it's going to be difficult to navigate a career in the cloud if you are solely operating within those traditional vertical alignments," Grimes says.

Francesco Paola, vice president at consultancy Cloud Technology Partners, explains that burgeoning cloud concepts like software defined networking (SDN) and orchestration portals require IT professionals to have a solid working knowledge of the fluid, underlying cloud networking infrastructure, understand how cloud-enabled applications need to be built to ride on those rails, have insight into how server virtualization affects both of those parts of the picture, and be clued into how security can be wrapped around the whole shebang.

"In a cloud-based deployment, there can't be the kind of technology handoffs between silos in IT we have seen in the past. To achieve the efficiencies of a cloud investment, there has to be staff that can manage the layers of the cloud in cooperation with each other," Paola says. >>Read more

Source: NetworkWorld

In the fight over private versus public clouds, we’re all arguing about the same thing. But we keep doing it because we somehow believe we can confuse the customer into buying “more of mine” and “less of hers” if we explain how our vision of cloud is better. I’ve written about what cloud is or isn’t several times in the past, but, I feel that I missed some important context. The context is what leads me to consider the idea of three different clouds.

So what are they?

Public cloud – The only “real” cloud as someone like Werner Vogel of Amazon would say

Private cloud – An on-site or hosted private cloud-capable environment

Actual cloud -The set of strategies, processes, people and technologies that enable business agility, improved resource management, and faster time to market (among other things). The actual cloud is the real world amalgamation that users end up with and may consist of both or one of the above.

As the idea for this blog was first racing through my mind thought getting feedback on the term cloud from some of my friends would be a great way to further illuminate the disparity of thought on the subject of cloud. As you can see from the tweets and quotes below, each has their own take on the idea of “what is cloud, really?”

Joe Weinman, a SVP at Telx and author of the just-released Cloudonomics defines “cloud” via a retronym: C.L.O.U.D.: a Common, Location-independent, Online, Utility, on-Demand service. He argues that each of these properties generates statistically quantifiable economic value; for example, common resources lead to increased utilization when demands are independent. Such approaches, he argues, provide a sounder basis for cloud decision-making than hand waving.

Others were less scientific, such as Simon Wardley a lead researcher at the Leading Edge Forum, who tweeted: “IMHO – Cloud is a muppet marketing term used to window dress computer utilities as something else so other muppets pay more” >>Read more

Source: Gigaom