Episode 10 - "Clouds on the Storefront Horizon" + Show Notes

The Cloudcast (.net) - Eps.10 - "Clouds on the Storefront Horizon"
Date: June 1, 2011
Guest: Rodrigo Flores (@RFFlores) Technical Architect for Cloud Computing at Cisco, formerly the CTO/Founder at newScale; http://www.servicecatalogs.com/

Topic 1: We get a status update on the newScale acquisition by Cisco and what early projects Rodrigo and his team are working on. He tells us about on-going integration with VCE Vblock, VMware vCloud Director and Cisco Tidal Enterprise Orchestrator. He also hints at some upcoming integration around service delivery for network-level services.



Topic 2: Rodrigo talks about how his world essentially revolves around the concept of change and gives us some tips and tricks to help customers understand how to organize their thoughts and teams around these new self-service models. The bulk of the content on his blog, http://www.servicecatalogs.com/, is about the mindshift change happening with IT orgs when they start enabling Service Catalogs.

• How is the progress happening in that world?
• Is ITIL the biggest barrier to Self-Service adoption?

Topic 3: How are customers reacting to Self-Service types of IT engagement?

• How well do end-users deal with transparency of pricing?
• How well do organizations deal with shareback or chargeback environments?

Rodrigo shares some stories about customers that not only provide VMs and IT services in their catalogs, but also workplace resources and simple things like cleaning services. He discusses how companies manage the balance between available capacity and "buffet style" consumption models expected by end-users.

Topic 4: There are 100s of companies in this “Cloud Mgm’t” space, not to mention some of the high-profile open-source projects (and companies). We discuss how customers or channel-partners make any sense of this?  

• Lots of talk about open-APIs, REST, SOAP, Web Service calls - where are the standards going with this, or is it enough to just say “open API” or XML, etc..?? Rodrigo calls out jclouds and George Reese at enStratus for really moving this portion of the market forward.

Topic 5: Being a former CTO, Rodrigo had to break out your crystal ball quite a bit. So with the various open-source Cloud Management projects going on (OpenStack, Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nimbus, etc.), he shares his predictions on where he sees those efforts gaining traction and where packaged/commercial solutions will continue to dominate the market.