Ecosystem is the Killer App for Cloud Computing

We know all about these loose ecosystems of Barney-loving, hand-holding, kumbaya-singing companies who promise a full solution to help you take advantage of the next overwhelming wave of technology...for a fee.

In the past, vendor ecosystem announcements indicate a vague intention on the part of the vendors to do something together someday - providing they can all find a customer to pay for it.

With the cloud, however, ecosystems are different. They are easier to create, both from a business and technical point of view. They are also much more transparent, as the results of their efforts are available for the whole world to see.

WaveMaker, RightScale, IBM and Amazon just announced their own cloud ecosystem. This ecosystem is being marketed as a cloud quick start program, which aims to make cloud computing ridiculously easy and give companies a one-stop solution for migrating existing Java applications to SaaS and cloud computing.

Not only are all of the cloud quick start products fully integrated and running today in the Amazon cloud, but the integration is available for anyone to use who has an Amazon account. Even better, the first company to complete the 2 day cloud quick start program, KANA, was so impressed with the results that they plan on going live with their first cloud deployment before the end of the year.

What makes the cloud unique is not the individual bits of software running in some dark data center, but that for the first time it is easy to stand up a number of complex pieces of software, knit them all together and make the resulting integrated solution available to anyone who wants to use them.

Take for example the elements of the cloud quickstart program, which integrates products from four enterprise software companies. Just imagine trying to pull off this kind of integration without the cloud.

First of all, you would have to get software licenses from each vendor, then find a place to install them all and then figure out how to integrate them. These tasks alone would take weeks to months.

Now compare that with the same scenario in the cloud. WaveMaker, RightScale and Amazon already have software running on Amazon EC2 and available for anyone to use. Once the companies have done the basic integration work, it is easy to produce custom AMIs that provide a pre-integrated solution to the rest of the world.

The cloud quickstart program for cloud application development from WaveMaker, RightScale, IBM and Amazon is not the only example of this kind of ecosystem. An equally impressive ecosystem for cloud business intelligence launched a little over a month ago featuring RightScale, Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica.

Cloud hosting providers like Amazon provide a sort of global workbench on which software vendors can integrate quickly and without even having explicit business relationships. This may in the end prove to be the real killer app for cloud computing - the ability to adopt entire software ecosystems with the click of a button.

What Separates A Cloud From (water) Vapor?

I spoke this morning with the cloud evangelist for a hardware manufacturer. Not surprisingly, they come at cloud from the iron up, so for them cloud is mostly about virtualization with a little more buzz.

While I can understand this viewpoint, if today's cloud is just yesterday's server consolidation in new clothes, then Larry Ellison's latest "a cloud is just water vapor" rant is probably appropriate.

So what exactly is the dividing line between virtualization and true cloud goodness? I think the key lies in bringing together a fuller solution with a cloud platform than with a virtualization platform.

Cloud computing gets interesting when the platform includes not just deployment (infrastructure as a service or IaaS) but also development (platform as a service or PaaS). Linking these two capabilities opens up fundamentally new markets as well as compelling economics.

Virtualization is about abstracting application deployment so that one box can run many apps, with each app pretending that it is lord and master of it's virtual computer. The value of virtualization is to reduce the amount of hardware needed to run a set of apps and correspondingly reducing the amount of systems administration time needed to manage the overall data center.

Cloud computing is about abstracting application development and deployment so that anyone can develop and manage applications without needing specialized expertise. The value of cloud computing is to reduce all IT costs while increasing organizational flexibility. More people can build the apps they need and fewer expert developers, DBAs and systems administrators are needed.

At its core, virtualization improves IT efficiency - doing traditional computing with fewer resources. On the other hand, cloud computing improves IT effectiveness - empowering more people to build applications with more flexibility and fewer experts. For example, this is the core value prop behind IBM's Cloud Quickstart Program, which includes IBM, Amazon EC2, WaveMaker and RightScale.

Our view at WaveMaker is that the big private cloud payoff comes only when you make both development and deployment of web apps radically easier (cloud-ready computing). If you will, virtualization and private cloud management (IaaS) both reduce the administration costs - the cost transformation comes when you slash not just administration but also development and maintenance costs (IaaS + PaaS).