I was asked this question from a visitor at CeBIT after my lecture/ panel “Public vs. Private cloud” during the Webciety 2013. We then talked a little about this topic. His question was, why some companies decide for a private cloud despite of the massive investments, and how they measure these capital expenditures and justify it.

Private cloud is a huge financial effort

Who decides for the construction of a real private cloud should also aware that this means more than just build a terminal server. Cloud computing, even in the private cloud, means among other things self-service, scalability, resource pools, automation, granular billing and on-demand retrieval of resources. One basis of the cloud is virtualization. For the virtualization hardware is required, from which the virtual resources are created. In order to ensure a significant scalability and availability an investment in hardware is necessary. Other cost items are the software that provides the cloud-functionality and is responsible for the pooling of resources, the automatic on-demand provisioning, self-service, billing, etc. In addition, you need the staff with the appropriate knowledge, that builds, maintains and operates the cloud infrastructure. Means, you become your own cloud provider.

So, if we consider which financial expenditures have to be lifted in order to realize the characteristics of a private cloud, we soon come to the conclusion that a private cloud from a purely economic point of view does not make sense. Unless one pays no attention to the cost and want to make his business more agile in a very private setting and increase the satisfaction of his employees, without going into the dependence of a provider and dependent on its level of data protection.

The KPIs of the cloud ROI need to be expanded

The successful use of cloud computing can’t always be expressed in hard numbers. I wrote more about this in the article “Cloud Computing ROI: Costs not always say a lot“.

I purposely advise not only to look at the actual cost while the rating of cloud computing, but include other factors which a typical return on investment (ROI) does not know. Its KPIs (key performance indicators) only measure the financial input and the resulting output. In the private cloud, the output will always be negative, because no real added value is directly seen. Unless you define one for yourself. This has nothing to do with cheating, but is a logical conclusion, which results from the flexibility and agility of cloud computing.

One of these KPIs and for me one of the most crucial is “the employee satisfaction“. This tells us how happy your employees are with the use and deployment of the current IT infrastructure. I claim that this KPI is dark red in many companies. Otherwise, there is no such high desire for shadow IT.

By building a private cloud the provision of resources can be strongly accelerated. This allows you to deploy servers within 5 minutes instead of days or weeks. Developers ask for the on-demand provisioning of resources. Just ask them. Unfortunately the value, which states that a developer or employee works satisfied, never flows into the ROI. But it should. Because the agility, flexibility and satisfaction should play as large a role as the actual costs.

In a recently published German interview, a VMware employee has been thrilled himself to the, for me, very vague and questionable statement “VMware is the technology enabler of the cloud, and I currently see no other.”. Without offending VMware, this sentence sounds to me very overestimating and is like a loss of reality. There is no doubt that VMware is the king of virtualization, but to assert that nothing would work without them in the cloud is very presumptuous.

Reality distortion field

It is a development of Steve Jobs, the Reality distortion field“. It is the property of being able to convince someone of what is true and twist the facts, that in the end it looks as if it was his own idea. Fortunately, VMware says not that they invented cloud computing, which would not be a loss of reality, but delusions of grandeur.

Virtualization is not cloud computing

It is very presumptuous to assert beeing the technology God of the cloud. Just think about what VMware actually provides as the basis for the cloud. It is virtualization, so the hypervisor. Of course, virtualization is one of the main bases for the cloud. But there is much more to do in order to provision the virtual resources and use them.

Sticking to the hypervisor, nobody can deny that VMware is the market leader. Here they do a good job. Nevertheless one should not forget that the Amazon Web Services and Rackspace are using the open source hypervisor XEN. The HP Cloud just as the Google Compute Engine rely on KVM.

So, the real cloud computing market leader do not set on VMware. Therefore, there can be no talk of that VMware is the technology enabler of the cloud.

Furthermore, one should not forget the many other technology providers like openQRM, OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, Microsoft, etc., who help companies to build infrastructures for the public as well for the private cloud. VMware is certainly a provider that meanwhile tries to got off his piece of the cake in the cloud. But in the end they are only one of many and have to hold one’s own like everyone else every day.

–

I know that I will have no friends at VMware with this article. But such an intolerable assertion I can not leave on the Internet, sorry VMware!