There is now a strong and growing need to get the major cloud infrastructure issues out of the way over the next two years, so that users can get to the point where they can confidently start innovating to build greater business agility.
That is the view of Neil Levine, Vice President of Corporate Services at open systems specialist, Canonical. The company is perhaps best known for its distribution of Linux, Ubuntu, a factor that might well give Canonical something of a lever in moving the infrastructure debate forward.
He sees the disruptive nature of the cloud as a real insertion point into the enterprise mainstream for Canonical as more businesses start requiring the previously niche hyperscale web capabilities, as used by customers like Google and Wikipedia, that are its forte.
Levine is aware that the cloud has reversed the natural polarity of `leadership’ in the relationship of business and IT within many companies. “Traditionally, it has been IT staff that have seen the benefits possible with the technology, and the business staff that have not. But with the cloud it is now business people who are leading, and technology staff that are lagging behind.”
That is why he feels the next two years are important. It will be during this time that the majority of infrastructure issues, such as standardising the interfaces between different technology stacks, will be settled. “Especially when it comes to infrastructures, the cloud is all about commoditisation,” he said, “and that means standardisation.
“That is when the developers can take charge,” he added.
This may seem a paradoxical suggestion in a world where `business’ is now starting to take a much more prominent role relative to `technology’. But Levine is clear it will be the development community that take the lead in building the tools that bring businesses the greater business agility they require.
“Once the major infrastructure issues are settled, it will be time for developers to exploit their ideas and concepts on how agility can be used,” he said, “rather than spending most of their time maintaining existing applications code. We are finding that developers are starting to get it, and we are aiming to foster that.”
It is worth noting that Canonical does have significant mindshare with large sections of the existing applications developer community and is, therefore, well placed to push the benefits and opportunities of cloud to them. And their skills will most certainly still be needed, particularly where they can then graft on a more comprehensive understanding of business issues so they can build business-effective agile services.
There are a couple of particular targets at which Canonical is aiming, at least in the short term. One is the enterprise use of VMware as a virtualisation environment. “Why should enterprises move? Because in the cloud they will need public, open APIs rather than proprietary ones, for the users are going to need applications and service portability” he said. “And all the relevant libraries are already open source.”
The other is the lifecycle of existing legacy applications. “To get horizontal scaling of many legacy applications enterprises will face the need to re-architect them, so we are aiming to hit enterprise users as their existing applications come towards the end of their lifecycle, as we can help with that re-architecting,” he said.
This does raise the issue of Canonical coming head to head in the enterprise space with the traditional major vendors. Levine is aware of this issue, and is more than prepared to sanction partnerships and white-label joint marketing efforts with them. “But they must `get it’,” he said. “Many still don’t.”
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