Insights from the Gartner Data Center Conference

I wanted to share some key thoughts from the recently completed Gartner Data Center conference. I had the chance to attend many of the sessions focused on cloud computing, and had several 1:1 sessions with the leading Gartner analysts covering Virtualization, Cloud, and Automation. It is difficult to boil down 4 very long days of sessions, meetings and discussions, but I wanted to share four key points that really caught my eye.

1. Cloud moved from 14th in 2009 to 2nd in terms of CIO priorities based on a Gartner survey. This is an amazing change in a short time period and speaks to the increased interest and focus that many organizations have on cloud. (My guess is few IT technologies or concepts have moved this far this fast.) This rapid acceleration in interest is consistent with the increased activity we see with our customers, looking to determine their overall cloud strategy, while looking for immediate opportunities to get started and get moving. Organizations need to start now on their cloud strategies..while also keeping an eye on the longer term architectural impacts and choices.
2. Business Intelligence is moving from rear view to a forward looking focus: (from Carl Claunch Keynote). This shift to more analytics and more proactive analysis indicates an increasing need for organizations to “out compute” their competitors to accelerate the pace of their business. We continue to see this as many organizations increase the size of their HPC/Grid environments..and look to a private cloud model to enable their users to tap into the compute capacity that lies dormant and underutilized within their organizations.
3. A Caution: 1/3 of startups in the management space disappear every 2 years (from Cloud Management Session). As CIO’s look to their emerging #2 priority (see point #1) it is very important they consider who and what type of companies they partner with to enable the evolution from siloed to shared cloud infrastructure. A balance between innovation and the ability of these software partners to deliver over the long haul is key for a large enterprise to consider.
4. DISA Private Cloud End User session: ¾ of the Battle in Building a private cloud is Cultural. We have seen this time and time again over our 15+ year history as our HPC and Grid customer base has evolved and adopted their large scale shared compute environments. Many organizations have deployed and adopted key technology components that enable them to build an automated, virtualized, cloud infrastructure. What they have struggled with is the political/cultural side of sharing, getting their end users and business unit customers, comfortable with a dynamic shared infrastructure. Our experience in helping customers make this journey is clearly relevant to helping enterprise users make a similar journey into the cloud.

Overall another very good Gartner event clearly indicating the increased interest and importance large enterprise organizations are placing on defining their cloud strategy and the issues/challenges they face on their road to building their next generation IT infrastructure in a cloud model.