Friday 30 July 2010

The Cloud Services Market is Looking Like a Red Ocean

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Earlier this week, Opsource announced a partner program. The news came on Monday, the first day developers could download code from OpenStack, a separate initiative that has had considerable attention this week.


Both companies provide cloud infrastructure based upon open source. They could easily be part of a same open-cloud network such as OpenStack. But for now Opsource says it will not join the effort lead by Rackspace. Our guess is Opsource competes to some extent with Rackspace and is looking at other alternatives.

Rackspace, Opsource and almost two dozen other companies are now offering a variety of cloud infrastructures. It's an increasingly crowded market that is due for some consolidation. But for the moment, the market is an example of how companies perceive the opportunities the cloud provides.

Rackspace, as we know, provides public cloud infrastructure. Opsource offers cloud infrastructure to the enterprise, service providers and systems integrators.

Opsource calls its program a partner ecosystem. These partners include integrators, developers, ISVs, cloud platform companies and telecom providers.

Opsource expects 50% of its revenue to come from these partners, and points in particular to telecommunications companies. CEO Treb Ryan:
"The feedback we're getting from the telecoms is that a request for cloud is becoming an increasing part of the RFP's they are seeing from customers. Usually it comes as a request for bundled services (such as managed network, internet access, hosting and cloud.) One of our European telecoms stated they couldn't bid on $2 million a month worth of contracts because one of the requirements was cloud."
Ryan says customers want to work with one company:
"Most likely it's a combination of not wanting to go to separate vendors for separate services (i.e. a colo company for hosting, OpSource for cloud, a telecom for network, and a managed security company for VPN's) they want to get it all from one vendor completely integrated. Secondly, I think many customers have a trusted relationship with their telecom for IT infrastructure services already and they trust them more than a third-party company."
Opsource and Rackspace are two well-established companies in the cloud computing space. But the number of providers in the overall market is beginning to morph.

John Treadway of Cloud Bzz put together a comprehensive list. He says the market is looking more like a red ocean:
"I hope you'll pardon my dubious take, but I can't possibly understand how most of these will survive. Sure, some will because they are big and others because they are great leaps forward in technology (though I see only a bit of that now). There are three primary markets for stacks: enterprise private clouds, provider public clouds, and public sector clouds. In five years there will probably be at most 5 or 6 companies that matter in the cloud IaaS stack space, and the rest will have gone away or taken different routes to survive and (hopefully) thrive."
Lots of blood in the water. Who's going to get eaten first?

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