Comments on: Five things Cassatt taught us about cloud computing

With the acquisition of utility computing infrastructure vendor Cassatt by CA this week, it is worth taking a moment to reflect on the lessons learned from a company that was well ahead of its time.

[swaldrum]

Good article James. Felt much of the same pain in my previous stint heading up Product Management for an enterprise IT Financial management solution. Financial management and charge-backs become much more complex when IT is running shared services like enterprise clouds for the business units. You can no longer pin the gear to the business unit, forcing IT to take on the capital expenses and figure out how to recover those costs from the business units based on usage.

Existing policies, procedures both from Ops and Finance seemed to stall adoption of this model and therefore our solution as well. Like you say, just a matter of time...

Currently, at <a href=http://www.ipapplications.com>IPA</a> we provide subscription billing solutions to other SaaS companies. Refreshing to see how aggressively the companies in this space are adopting our (and other) cloud based solutions.

[ReedSmith]

Agree, virtualization and cloud are the beginning of the end of functional tech siloes, though it will take a while for everyone in the industry to adapt.

So what is a Private Cloud and what is the difference between that and an outsourced, virtualized IT infrastructure?

[cglenn3932]

I had shared this post with my boss and when he read it, he had to write up his own blog post to complement the central idea here: that cloud computing is a business model and not a technology in itself. We certainly have a number of products and services that support the business model of applications in the cloud, but we think our customers (ones you've all probably heard of in the SaaS space) have the most leadership in this area. Shaun's latest post is at http://seamlessenterprise.com/?p=649

Thanks James, your blog post sparked some good discussion within our company.

[enovikoff]

As a previous potential customer of Cassatt, I think there were other factors as well that got in the way of Cassatt's success. I'm a partner in a specialized high-performance cloud computing company that uses a variety of technologies. Before we picked any of them, we tried to partner with Cassatt, because as you pointed out, they had parts of the vision for enterprise cloud exactly right. However, they snubbed us because their sales model was to the enterprise directly, not to managed service providers that aimed to serve the enterprise. In other words, Cloud Computing is just outsourced virtualization with management. They didn't understand that, and tried to push Cloud inside the enterprise well before its time, while service providers such as ourselves were already starting to respond to demand from enterprises. Much like the railroads missed the opportunities to become trucking companies and airlines because they mistook their technology for their business, Cassatt mistook enterprise-grade virtualization management for providing a solution to the enterprise that they were ready to buy. Nowadays, I still see the same preserve-my-silo resistance inside enterprises that they did when I try to sell an enterprise Cloud Computing, but the difference is not only 3 years but also that I'm only selling them something they can't or won't yet provide for themselves. In other words, I'm satisfying demand rather than creating it.

-Eric Novikoff
ENKI
http://www.enkiconsulting.net