Last week, I wrote about a study predicting the 39% of Small to Medium Size Business would be moving to the cloud in the next three years. (Survey shows that 39% SMB Will Move to the Cloud) Now Cisco announced that it was planning to acquire newScale a software company whose portal software allows IT service providers to build catalogs of standardized services that customers can select and deploy off the shelf and on their own.
What does newScale Provide?
newScale’s portals make many desktop and data center support services “self-help,” allowing enterprise customers to initiate the provisioning of their own systems and infrastructure on an as-needed basis. This plays into Cisco’s hands because they intend to apply that same methodology to cloud computing. This is similar to Amazon Web services. In fact the Cisco-newScale pairing would allow customers to build, engage, and expand their own private cloud infrastructure using an as-needed basis, which is based on standardized service options.
Is the Cloud One Dimensional?
What this means is that the cloud is evolving, and no one set of operations will make it tangible, there can be multiple settings. Consider that by some views, the cloud is just a repository of files. A backup plan. But Microsoft, Amazon, newScale are challenging that notion.
Microsoft is making a heavy investment in cloud services, and they have demonstrated that their Cloud Efforts are Slowly Building Steam. For example, they have recently commited with Manpower, Tampa General Hospital, Advocate Health Care, Shell, and other companies to make the transition to having IT services run through the cloud.
In the long run, companies will be better positioned to make such a move, in part because cloud services can be cheaper in the long run. The technology on the cloud will be state of the art, and companies will lease services and hardware, that they couldn’t afford otherwise.
See Also: Netflix Goes to the Cloud with Amazon
Source: MarketWire
Image: DefineTheCloud
Source: Cisco
