Tuesday, April 3, 2012

IT's the Cloud Eco-system that Matters Most


Just catching up on some of my cloud news this morning and read an interesting PR release from the CloudStack team over at Citrix. Generally the news was less interesting than a couple small tidbits from the actual press release. In it, they stated that CloudStack has "hundreds of production clouds, collectively generating more than $1 billion in cloud revenue."

Yes, you head correctly, $1,000,000,000 in collective cloud revenue. It is impressive to say the least. But what I really think they're saying is that their "eco-system" is monetizing like crazy. Although I have no proof, it does make you wonder.

An eco-system is why people choose to build applications for a certain platform, for example Apple over let's say Android, or AWS over Azure or salesforce over whomever. It's always the eco-system. Moreover it's the ability to leverage a large talent pool of users, customers and solution providers. It's the ability to piggy back atop of what others have already done and best of all, a quick and easy way sell to them.

Moving on, I also found this little bit interesting. Again focus on the numbers;
The transition to the Cloud is fueling a massive build out of cloud infrastructure, projected to exceed $11 billion by the end of 2014. This new market will feature thousands of successful clouds of all shapes and sizes, ranging from business, infrastructure and developer offerings, to consumer, mobile and gaming services. The proposed Apache CloudStack project will make it easier for customers of all types to deliver cloud services on a platform that is open, powerful, flexible and “Proven Amazon Compatible.”

They've hit both, they're saying they have an eco-system, but they're also themselves leveraging the AWS API to hit Amazon's Cloud eco-system.

To me, this speaks to the main and most important reason to choose a particular platform, *stack or cloud over another. The ability to capitalize on its eco-system. An interesting move and one to watch in the coming months.

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