Bring In the Clouds - Doug Adams, Vice President of Sales and Marketing

Maybe it was people leaving early to head over to see the Yankees in this evening’s American League baseball playoff game, but attendance seemed a bit lighter here at the second day of the fall Interop show in New York City than on the first few days. 

Still, the overall excitement and activity levels were noticeably higher at this year’s show than in recent years. More people were looking to partner, and talking about business opportunities. And as my colleague Denoid Tucker noted yesterday, nearly everyone was talking about cloud computing.

Interop is clearly transitioning from a networking show to a cloud show. The difficulty with that, however, is getting people to agree on what “the cloud” actually is. While walking around the show floor today, I asked a variety of people how they define the cloud, and got a multitude of answers.

Cloudy definitions?

Some want to define the cloud as a new way of delivering existing products and services via the Internet. Oracle, for instance, announced at its OpenWorld event this week that its data centers will soon provide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for customers wanting to deploy its Oracle Fusion applications in a public cloud setting.

For me, the definition of the cloud is very simple: it’s granular IT services delivered across the Web. Those services can be anything from StrataScale’s managed servers to Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management software.

There was also plenty of Interop discussion about infrastructure and what it means to offer IaaS. Again, the industry hasn’t yet settled on a standard definition. We see ourselves as an IaaS vendor, so I guess we’re as qualified as anyone to define the term.

We see IaaS as data center and server infrastructure delivered remotely. That infrastructure can include networking, servers, storage, security, etc., as long as they’re delivered via the Internet. Of course there’s different ways of delivering Internet infrastructure. StrataScale is unique in that it offers IaaS through both public and private clouds, as well as through dedicated server, co-location and hybrid solutions.

Where we’re headed

So where’s all this taking us? Thanks to cloud technology and all of the great technology on display at Interop, I expect accessing IT services to eventually be as simple and reliable as flipping on a light switch. Just as we don’t often think about the transformers, power lines, substations and generating plants that deliver our power, we’ll also start to take cloud infrastructure for granted. Just fire up a Web browser and everyone and everything will be accessible via the Web, and we won’t care where it’s coming from.

This is where we’re heading. And as a result, don’t be surprised to see Interop eventually turn into Cloud World.

In closing, I'd like to pay my respects to one of the great innovators of our time. Steve Jobs, may you rest in peace.