Game changer for Virtualization & Cloud Computing

I attended the Microsoft Hosting Days at Mumbai,India, recently to get a grip of what Microsoft says about the next big thing. Virtualization and Cloud Computing

I must commend them for doing a good job with presenting those concepts neatly. It is indeed a revelation that already a little more than 50% of enterprise I.T. has looked beyond internal hosting spread between a variety of hybrid models. Spread across private clouds (internal private cloud computing and virutalization) and public clouds (those provided by hybrid hosting services), the adoption of this wave already seems to be well on its way. Software vendors like Microsoft are indeed attempting to change the game with their dynamic data center solutions.

While there was a reality check that the everlasting question on security and data privacy will keep internal hosting alive, a new breed of virtualization technologies and cloud computing tools that are being offered to both enterprises and third party service providers will provide a compelling reason to pay attention to what need not be in house and what need not be a single box any longer.

While the open source world and vendors like Microsoft compete for this space of providing tools that manage virtualization for the I.T. administrators, it would be interesting to see how the game changes once software applications and platforms turn into SaaS and PaaS as these are more SLA oriented. Committing on SLA’s to customers could in turn request a back to back with SLA’s on virtualization and cloud computing tools and platforms.

Microsoft did look to have a solid vision behind this opportunity. Are the others as aggressive in this space ?