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Cloud Middlemen: The Case of Zimory and the Cloud Marketplace
If you look up the word "middleman" at dictionary(dot)com, you get the usual definitions of "person who plays an economic role intermediate between producer and retailer or consumer" and the more generic "person who acts as an intermediary". But clearly better than both of those is the origin of the term in the late middle ages as "maker of girdles". I swear I did not make this up.
So it is with a big grin on my face that I read the news about Zimory, a Deutsche Telekom spin-off that launched Public Cloud, a marketplace for companies that want to buy and sell hosted server capacity online. As much as I would like to scoff at yet another middleman trying to get their cut of the action, I have to say I like this idea.
Services like Public Cloud open up monetary opportunities for a broader range of companies to play in the cloud space; cloud computing is not and shouldn't be limited to just the big guys, e.g., Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Creating a marketplace that brings together buyers and sellers in this way supports some of the promises of the cloud - driving down price and raising quality of service in a truly competitive arena where end users don't have to worry about who provides the service, just buy and pay for the service they need (all other things like security, sla's, etc. being equal). In this scenario, there are more cloud provider choices, and customers' applications (via virtual machines in Zimory's case) should be easily portable between cloud providers.
But application portability between cloud providers requires standards that have yet to materialize. There's been a lot of talk about creating the standards from organizations like the Open Cloud Consortium, a group of universities who are tackling performance and cloud interoperability issues, and once the federal government gets into the act, I'm sure there will be a lengthy NIST document that comes out in a few years.
And then there's the recent Open Cloud Manifesto which carefully skirts the issue of actually creating open cloud standards and instead focuses on supporting open cloud principles. And what that is beyond a marketing ploy, I will leave you to figure out - especially since Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and Google - the major cloud providers have all declined to sign the Manifesto.
So back to Zimory's cloud marketplace. I couldn't find the article, but I remember reading about a university that was offering extra space in its datacenter, for a fee to companies. That's certainly not the only example of an IT group with computing to spare. Couple that with utilizing the IT management resources - tools and people - that you have already invested in, put yourself out there on a cloud marketplace like Zimory and presto, you just might turn IT from a cost center to a revenue generator.
About the Author David Link is president and CEO of ScienceLogic. He and his partners built a thriving company from the ground up by focusing on delivering "products that just work" to the underserved IT infrastructure management marketplace. He has held senior management and corporate officer positions at large public companies.
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