Hosting and Cloud, How are they Playing Together – a Panel Discussion

Webhostingde - : - (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The first big panel discussion of the day was called “Cloud and Hosting – How Well are they Playing Together? Where to Next?” a conversation that involved Peder Ulander, chief marketing officer at Cloud.com, Treb Ryan, chief executive officer at OpSource, Mick Linesch, VP of strategy and portfolio management for enterprise server and networking at HP, and Lance Crosby, CEO at SoftLayer.
The session was moderated by Tier1’s Phil Shih, senior analyst for mass market hosting, and Doug Toombs, senior analyst for managed services.
Obviously a lot is going to be said in the course of a discussion like this, and to cover it all is going to be next to impossible. But I’ll try to key in on specific interesting things said by the panelists.
Crosby says SoftLayer doesn’t necessarily look at dedicated hosting customers and cloud hosting customers as being separate. He says the company imagines that customers ultimately will use a certain percentage of dedicated services, a certain percentage of virtualized services and a certain amount of cloud, because there are certain workloads that are just well suited to each. Generally, what we’ve come to describe as the “hybrid” approach to deploying cloud services.
Linesch says enterprise customers, in a lot of ways, are in a position to make a lot of sourcing choices, and that there are all kinds of new sourcing options out there. They look at it as an opportunity to present more value to the organization.
Ryan says there is a generation of users who only want to buy things that way (the cloud). As a managed hosting provider, OpSource simply had to get into that business. And one of the interesting consequences of getting into the cloud business is that you stop being just a hosting business and become a software business.
According to Ryan, the company is also, interestingly, seeing customers who only want to buy cloud services for their infrastructure, but are also buying all kinds of managed services on top of that.
The panelists in general seemed to agree that too much is said about what’s wrong with Amazon’s cloud offering in the hosting business. According to Piraino, Amazon owns about 50 percent of the cloud infrastructure business. Obviously they’re doing a lot of things right. And the panelists think there is a lot that the hosting business can take from Amazon as examples – particularly in terms of how they simplify and bring online the ordering and provisioning, as well as communicating its unique value proposition to customers.
Ulander says one of the opportunities for hosting providers is among customers who are looking for new providers just because they don’t want one company (in this case Amazon) to own all of their business. Another way for hosting providers to compete with Amazon, he says, is to emphasize the value they add on top of the infrastructure.