Sensible Cloud - Leaders in Cloud Computing

Generations of hardware and software acquisitions have been made using traditional capital or expense cost models that require your organization to pay large amounts of up-front fees for the use of long-term assets.  In the large majority of cases the return on any investment has never been proven to be positive, and yet still we buy these critical business resources on “trust” and belief that we will garner value and benefit from them.

Software as a Service (SaaS) threatened to reduce a lot of the risk and headache as we moved to a simpler subscription model for “renting” software and application licenses.  This still requires paying a regular fee for the right to use software or services that may not be fully utilized over the contracted period – e.g. a per user model charges whether the user is actively using the software or is on holiday or asleep. It is a step in the right direction, but not far enough.

One of the key business benefits to customers, and key disruptors to hardware and software selling machines is cloud computing’s base in the pay-as-you-go model, i.e. you only pay for what you use at the time you use it. Imagine being able to provide a brand new high powered server farm for the introduction of a new web based service to your market with zero capital outlay, only minutes of  configuration, and per use business terms that charge you for what you consume and can be setup online in a few minutes.

Cloud computing, whether you are acquiring extended hardware resources,  whole application platforms or component business services allows you to only pay for resources you use. This approach is revolutionizing the way organizations buy and measure their success from IT related purchases, impacting the vacuous and aggressive over selling techniques of traditional IT vendors and giving the market a much more transparent way to manage and monitor the commercial relationships created.  The consumer is put back in charge of the value chain and decides how and where to drive in a transparent assessment of the use and value against the costs incurred.

By offering sense as a pay-as-you-go license and providing business criteria for how IT resources are allocated to high value business application in real time, sense provides the maximum business control of how IT operations dollars are used. Operating across your existing JEE servers, virtualization solutions and cloud operations transparently, sense can bring the enterprise guarantees, policies, and SLAs that you demand to your cloud based soluitons (whether private opr public).

Like its ancestors; “what is client/server?” and “what is SOA?”, questions like “what is cloud computing?” are already attracting numerous marketing based answers, discussions and blogs.  Here we’ll try to put a clear and simple label on cloud computing.  Feel free to help us adjust this with your comments.

Cloud computing is the evolution and convergence of a number of fast maturing market threads; virtualization, utility computing and software as a service (SaaS).  While cloud computing already extends beyond the sum of these three, they represent the core of what is fast becoming the most disruptive computing model of the 2000′s.

• Virtualization – abstracts away from the underlying hardware technology and provides a complete software interface to interact and manage all aspects of physical hardware representation.
• Utility computing – provide access to computing resource on a pay-as-you-go model without the need to invest in the capital to build your own computing infrastructure (not unlike utility companies that produce, distribute and sell electricity).
• SaaS – deliver business application functionally over the web at a subscription rate without the need to buy or install software licenses

These concepts combine in cloud computing to provide transparent access to required computing software and hardware services on a pay-as-you-go model.  While there are numerous technical and commercial twists in the different cloud offerings on the market the following principles should be common to cloud based solutions:

• No requirement to operate or even understand in detail the underlying hardware technology or core software operating platform - you are abstracted away from the technical complexity of servers, routers, switches, etc.
• You access the cloud service only when you need it and are only charged for your use - pay-as-you-go model
• You access cloud services that represent some unit of business input or value to you – underlying transactions, protocols and messaging are hidden in the cloud
• You do not require proprietary software or protocols to use cloud services integrated into your existing business applications domain – everything should be transparently available to existing development methods and practices (JEE, Web 2.0, SOA, etc.)
• You can choose to run cloud computing on your own site and infrastructure, on external hosted resources or on some combination of the two – mix and match onsite versus remote cloud operations

As you explore the benefits of cloud computing to your organization these simple principles will help you test your requirements against the declared offerings of your selected vendors (including Sensible Cloud).  You should thoroughly test the cloud offering against many or all of them.

Another definition of Cloud Computing

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Frequently answered questions.  If you don’t see your question please ask as a comment and we’ll see what we can do.

Thanks.