Archived Posts

In the last blog entry I talked about the business, financial and contractual side of enterprise cloud. Lets change gears and discuss the technology. Basically there aren’t a lot of differences and the premise is the same - use virtualization to provide a different ROI (not necessarily lower) for the computing needs of the enterprise. If we take a look at enterprise workloads, we get a little more insight into the characteristics that become more important for an enterprise vs. a 2.0/developer customer.

Many enterprise cloud deployments are “project”-based — that is, the enterprise needs to add a new feature - e.g. CRM - needs it up quickly, wants to avoid capital expense, etc. The need for extreme elasticity is rarely included in the workloads of an enterprise. Sure, once a month having some extra horsepower to close the books is great, but it’s not an hour-by-hour swing of multiples of the environment we might see from a social media site. There is also the need for short-term project based solutions – e.g. need a development environment for a few months to build out a new version of an app - do a trial with a new software solution, etc.