"75% of all organization who planned for cloud computing said they wanted private clouds first and public clouds later, or not at all"

It certainly sounds like it will be an enterprise world dominated by private clouds, at least in 2010, according to the latest survey by Enterprise Management Associates.

However, the notion of a Private Cloud took some collective beating (to put it mildly) in a recent webcast hosted by Appirio. Is a private cloud really a "fools" cloud -- simply a glorified term for datacenter virtualization? Will it be go the dinosaurs' way in a few years? Or is it here to stay just as the Enterprise Intranet has been hanging around for a long time alongside the Public Internet?

Key Insights
"Look Ma, No Sharing"

The central tenet of privacy is one of exclusivity i.e. the infrastructure and applications are meant solely for the use of one company and are typically not meant to be shared with anyone else considered to be "outside" the company.

However, in terms of deployment, customers do not define "privateness" in pure black or white terms. Rather, they define it in a range of grays based on their own business drivers, regulatory/compliance/legal issues, and risk exposure. One extreme end of the spectrum is where a company entirely owns and manages the cloud infrastructure and applications inside its own premises and firewall. On the other extreme end of the spectrum is where a company outsources everything to a third party vendor who hosts and manages the cloud infrastructure and/or applications outside the companies premises and/or firewall. In practice, customer deployments fall into one of the multitude of permutations between these two extremes.

We have seen exceptions in our research even to the exclusivity rule: we know of one case where a company is sharing infrastructure (hosted by a 3rd party) with a limited number of "trusted" partners and another case where a company is thinking of letting other "trusted" companies use (read lease) their infrastructure when they are not using it.

Some percentage of business-specific applications (e.g. legacy) and some hardware resources--particularly in large Global Enterprises--cannot be shared for a variety of business, technical, and practical reasons. Our view, therefore, is that Private clouds (working in conjunction with public clouds in a hybrid scenario) will be the norm for several years to come despite the fact they may not provide the benefits of scalability and innovation to the same degree that an external cloud is likely to deliver. In fact, what we will see, and to some extent, what we are already seeing is public cloud innovations being brought inside the firewall in the form of cloud management frameworks, appliances, and SaaS applications--all geared towards private (and hybrid) clouds. While it may be somewhat difficult to build and operate a private cloud that plays nicely with external clouds today, that won't necessarily be the case 2 or 3 years from now.

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JasperSoft brings SaaS architectures (multi-tenancy et al) to a Private Cloud.
When will the crowd turn against private cloud?

"30 percent of SMB's plan to implement Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and managed services in 2010" : CompTIA Survey.

"Only 11 percent of large Enterprises plan for exclusive external cloud usage": EMA survey.

Key Insights
SMB customers are on the leading edge of cloud adoption with some of them spending up to 80% of their IT budgets in the cloud with most of them considering SaaS ERP, CRM, and financial applications.

Larger enterprise customers on the other hand are leaning heavily towards private clouds with some experimental forays into public clouds. It's interesting to note that these enterprises are already operating heavily virtualized infrastructures (> 70% virtualized) and that these very same companies are also most likely to push ahead with private cloud initiatives. SaaS applications are also popular amongst large enterprises as long as these applications meet their diverse internationalization and customization requirements.

Aiming to make the integration easier across private clouds and public clouds, VMWare released this week open source Java and Python SDK's for VMWare vCloud API

Startup Boomi has teamed with E-Procurement company Coupa Software to enable a more automated method of managing the sales lead to cash process. Furthermore, the partnership enables end-to-end integration and interoperability across 60+ SaaS and on-premise applications, effectively solving the integration challenge on behalf of the customers.

Key Insights
Aside from the Security (which is a perennial favorite), vendor lock-in, cloud interoperability (particularly between private and public), and application/data integration between SaaS applications rank consistently high in customer's concerns.

VMWare's and Boomi's announcements this week are a step in the right direction to alleviate these customer concerns and to foster developer and integration ecosystems that can help accelerate the growth of the cloud market and customer adoption.

"Though census planning is a 10-year effort, the actual census takes place over only a few months. By the time all is said and done, the Census Bureau will mail out 600 million forms and count about 340 million people and 130 million households before quickly ramping down. According to Census CIO Brian McGrath, budgets will be quickly slashed once the census is over, forcing the bureau to think now about how to save money over the mid-term."

Key Insights
The Census scenario is perfect example of how cloud computing comes to the rescue by providing the IT resources just when they are needed during the peak census period and then quickly ramping down as the census process winds down.

The agency has had some early success with SalesForce, Akamai, and in building its own multi-tenanted private cloud. Although early in its cloud strategy, the agency can stand to gain enormously if it taps into the on-demand scalability of Infrastructure-as-a-Services (and other cloud services) out there during the Census season.

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Census mulls on the cloud