Product Consolidation a Hot Topic at This Week’s Cloud Expo

Wednesday was another eventful day here in Silicon Valley at the 9th Cloud Expo trade show, which seems to be attracting a surprisingly large crowd of vendors and potential customers from across the cloud computing industry.

Much of the news media’s attention thus far has focused on how the titans of the industry – such as Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Amazon – are positioning themselves to do business in the cloud. But just as interesting to me are the conversations taking place on the sidelines of the event between small and medium-size users of the cloud.

Walking the show floor and in conversations at StrataScale’s booth I’ve picked up on several important themes. First of all, a market consolidation seems to be taking shape. Not in the classic sense of mergers and acquisitions, but in a growing desire by companies large and small to gain access to a wider variety of cloud-based products and capabilities.

Companies that have invested in their own customer relationship management systems, for instance, want to be able to move that into the cloud without making significant changes. They don’t want to have to replicate the hardware, and they want to be able to use a consistent operating system solution across multiple platforms.

In a broader sense, people expect this market to grow quickly and they are prepping for scale.Many of them see a small window of opportunity to establish a presence, so the bigger companies are seeking what they don’t have in the way of development from smaller companies, while the smaller companies are partnering.

You see companies like VMware and Citrix Systems trying to form loose confederations of SaaS and IaaS customers around their differing approaches to virtualization. And the security and ownership of data is a concern for almost everyone.

It’s clear to me that cloud computing is ushering in a revolutionary new era in business and technology by providing affordable access to virtually unlimited supplies of distributed computing resources. Yet most of the IT industry is still sorting out how best to take advantage of these new capabilities, and the enormous market potential they represent.

One of the most interesting things about this market is that much of what’s now taking place is being driven by the customers, rather than by the usual handful of dominant systems vendors. In many cases, the users are requesting new ideas and features, and the suppliers are scrambling to respond as quickly as they can.

It’s an exciting time to be on the front lines of such a diverse and fast moving industry, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Stay tuned for more reports from the show tomorrow.