SaaSkatoon

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to speak to OpSource CEO Treb Ryan about OpSource Cloud, the company’s headlong thrust into the enterprise cloud computing space long-dominated by…well, no one to this point.  Until now, OpSource has focused primarily on being a leading delivery platform for SaaS businesses, providing infrastructure, operations, and billing services to companies that, for all intents and purposes, already live in “the cloud.”  OpSource Cloud sets cross hairs on the enterprise (read: corporate) market, which for legitimate reasons has been largely apprehensive about shifting IT assets to the public cloud.

When I first read the OpSource Cloud announcement, I can’t say that the concept moved me to want to shout it from the rooftops; part of the reason is that I spent the first 10 years of my career managing IT infrastructure and I lost my passion for it long ago.  Another reason is that my company, Delivered Innovation, lives in a different part of the cloud “stack” and we leave the management of platforms and databases to our partners such as salesforce.com.  But I’ve followed Treb for the past few years, and I knew that someone with his vision had a grander plan than just building a better Amazon EC2.

While OpSource Cloud will of course be widely compared to Amazon and RackSpace at a technical level, what I was looking for from Treb during his demo was whether he attacked the major concerns, real and otherwise, that enterprises have about moving IT resources beyond the walls of their corporate data centers.  The web-based management and provisioning interface had a clean look and feel, the process of setting up an account and system users was straightforward enough, and getting up and running with a standard Red Hat image took all of a few clicks and about 8 minutes of processing on the back-end.  I was extremely impressed, although admittedly I don’t have enough experience with other services to provide any type of competitive benchmark.  But what I did come away with was a sense of Treb’s laser-like focus on the key barriers to enterprise adoption that have caused cloud computing services to be regarded more as curious novelties than real drivers of value in the corporate IT world: security, performance, and management control.  And it was this focus that got me excited about OpSource Cloud, because I see this service offering as being a key step forward in driving the legitimacy and acceptance of cloud computing in the enterprise.

My key takeaways from the demo and my discussion with Treb:

1. OpSource isn’t reinventing the wheel here – rather than using a proprietary virtualization technology, they are leveraging VMWare, which already has a significant foothold in the enterprise.  This has its pros – namely that IT organizations are already familiar with VMWare and OpSource Cloud gains instant credibility by leveraging the VMWare brand equity.  It also has its cons – Oracle, for example, has chosen not to embrace VMWare and does not openly support its products when installed on the platform.
2. The user security appears to provide granularity and control far beyond what Amazon provides.  While I don’t think many IT folks would run off and “spend all the money on XBoxes and flat screen TV’s” as Treb joked about, the enterprise IT market demands the same type of access control that it has for its in-house platforms.
3. When I pressed Treb about my concern that despite the 100% uptime SLA and the guaranteed latency between systems, we were still talking about the same public Internet and OpSource would be in the position of having to defend itself from user dissatisfaction over any performance degredation regardless of the location or source of the issue, he laid out a very compelling vision of leveraging MPLS between the corporate site and the OpSource Cloud to provide quality of service over the public network.  I’ll leave this up to folks smarter than myself to determine the feasibility of this, but I like that there was a solution in mind even though the problem may not necessarily be within the sphere of OpSource’s control.
4. Customers have complete control of private VLAN’s and network address translation (NAT), allowing them to determine which servers can be accessed over the public Internet, and which ones stay completely private.
5. A complementary storage offering is in the works, and is expected to be released in about two months.
6. OpSource Cloud will provide burstable CPU, allowing enterprises to scale computing capacity on demand.
7. Customers will be able to leverage dedicated firewall options.
8. The service touts SAS-70 compliance.
9. VMWare images will be portable between customer on-premise systems and OpSource Cloud instances.

It will be interesting to see how the market reacts to the OpSource Cloud.  It’s a step in the right direction from the perspective of addressing core concerns that have dogged enterprise adoption of cloud computing services. We’ll definitely keep an eye on it and the press reaction over the coming days and months.