Welcome!

Cloud Expo Authors: Derek Harris, Pat Romanski, Francois Lascelles, Elizabeth White, Roger Strukhoff

Related Topics: Cloud Expo, Open Source, Virtualization

Cloud Expo: Blog Feed Post

Get Off the Rails and Onto the Cloud

The development and growth of cloud computing is revolutionizing network management and monitoring services

Infrastructure 2.0 on Ulitzer

For IT managers and end-users alike, today’s cloud computing infrastructure seems almost too simple and uncomplicated – compared to the first generation of complex and resource-heavy network and systems management tools.

A Rich Man’s Club
First of all, systems management was a rich man’s club. The domain belonged to the big four: IBM, HP, CA (formerly Computer Associates) and BMC Software and their legendary products – OpenView, Tivoli, Unicenter and BMC Patrol. They invented and dominated the market.

Not such a terrible thing – at first – because they offered amazing tools. But they were very expensive, unbelievably complex, and it required people with PhDs to operate, install and maintain. Installation alone took months…even, in some cases, years!

But there were no viable alternatives. So, professional-grade tools were only for big companies that could afford paying $1 million or more (and up-front, too). Alternatives grew, but—even today—the big four still own 40% of the market.

The Challengers
But about 10 years ago, a quiet bunch of IT revolutionaries, tired of expensive, complicated operating systems and the resources needed to support them, created a new breed of network management software and network monitoring systems. Pioneers like Solarwinds, Groundwork, Zoho (Adventnet), Hyperic and others offered 80-90% of the services of the big four at only 20% of the cost. They brought network and systems monitoring to the rest of us.

These companies are faring well, as I write this. For example, Solarwinds, which recently issued an IPO, according to Gartner, has a market capitalization of $1.5 billion, on sales of $93 million.

This is feeding a frenzy of interest by investors and those looking to acquire profit makers – defying the current recession.

Consider recent transactions: Compuware acquired Gomez for $295 million, Hyperic was bought by VMWare and NetQoS was bought by CA for $200 million.

Software Bound
But the challengers and the legacy systems both have one thing in common: their systems are based on software – which requires permanent maintenance efforts. For example, you still have to maintain servers, install setup software, make updates, allocate storage and archive data, setup notification channels, make monitoring failure-proof, and provide remote access.

Consider this metaphor: it’s like being stuck in a train on rails. You can only move in the direction the engineer (in this case the software vendor) is going. And you’re subject to their issues, too, among them multiple code version, legacy codes, long release cycles.

2nd Generation Monitoring VendorsFlying, Rather than Taking the Train
But the development and growth of cloud computing is revolutionizing network management and monitoring services – whether it’s networks, websites, servers, VoIP, etc. It’s like turning in your train ticket for a plane ride.

The cloud changes the whole paradigm of network management and monitoring because it offers:

  • multi-tenancy benefits, e.g. a single code base used by multiple customers
  • quick release cycles
  • behavioral analytics
  • customers stay in the loop via frequent communications regarding downtime instances and other stats.

Cloud GenerationWith cloud-based monitoring, customers are happy because there’s quick self-service, sign-up, deployment that takes minutes rather than weeks or months, dependable and constant upgrades to the latest version of software, and there are no maintenance issues or tasks to perform.

Yet, the cloud is not completely surrounded by blue skies. Yes, there are many businesses that are concerned about transferring their internal financial data from their own servers to the cloud. And, there have been recent episodes of cloud outages of consumer applications, such as Google’s email and blog services.

But I ask you… if businesses are comfortable with moving their customer data to the cloud, why would they resist migrating their server’s CPU metrics to the cloud?

Here’s my advice: get off the rails and onto the cloud.

Read the original blog entry...

More Stories By Hovhannes Avoyan

Hovhannes Avoyan is the CEO of Monitis, Inc., a provider of on-demand systems management and monitoring software to 50,000 users spanning small businesses and Fortune 500 companies.

Prior to Monitis, he served as General Manager and Director of Development at prominent web portal Lycos Europe, where he grew the Lycos Armenia group from 30 people to over 200, making it the company's largest development center. Prior to Lycos, Avoyan was VP of Technology at Brience, Inc. (based in San Francisco and acquired by Syniverse), which delivered mobile internet content solutions to companies like Cisco, Ingram Micro, Washington Mutual, Wyndham Hotels , T-Mobile , and CNN. Prior to that, he served as the founder and CEO of CEDIT ltd., which was acquired by Brience. A 24 year veteran of the software industry, he also runs Sourcio cjsc, an IT consulting company and startup incubator specializing in web 2.0 products and open-source technologies.

Hovhannes is a senior lecturer at the American Univeristy of Armenia and has been a visiting lecturer at San Francisco State University. He is a graduate of Bertelsmann University.

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.


Cloud Expo Breaking News
Why are APIs so important in clouds? Do APIs have to be open? How fast or slow will standardization in the cloud be? Why is ensuring high availability for the cloud service critical? In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Mårten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, will answer these questions and address cloud standards, APIs and the critical question: Will we end up with one, two or more competing cloud standards? And, how will this affect the evolution and adoption of cloud comput...
Very few trends in IT have generated as much buzz as cloud computing. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Mark Hinkle, Director, Cloud Computing Community at Citrix, will cut through the hype and quickly clarify the ontology for cloud computing. The bulk of the conversation will focus on the open source software that can be used to build compute clouds (infrastructure-as-a-service) and the complementary open source management tools that can be combined to automate the management...
The proliferation of device connectivity is redefining the functionality requirements and capabilities of many embedded systems as more and more of these devices look to leverage the “Cloud.” While many commercial software and hardware component vendors have begun to realign their value propositions to satisfy growing demand, commercial-off-the-shelf products (COTS) alone cannot meet every OEM’s needs. As a result, the Embedded Cloud has injected a new level of uncertainty and a new competitive ...
Hardware and chemistry improvements will make the $1,000 human genome a reality soon. While the massive amount of genomics data that will be generated represents a huge opportunity to advance personal medicine, it also presents an enormous big data challenge. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dr Andreas Sundquist, CEO of DNAnexus, will discuss how the cloud will address these issues by enabling the management, storage, sharing and analysis of the world’s DNA data and how it ...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...
In 2011, Apache Hadoop received tremendous attention for helping organizations cost-effectively capitalize on their big data. Hadoop is now disrupting the business of analyzing data. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Baldeschwieler, Co-Founder & CEO of Hortonworks, will look at the current state of the Hadoop project, lessons learned by deploying it at scale, and the roadmap for its future. Big Data Track attendees will learn about the exciting developments that have ...
With Big Data Expo 2012 New York (co-located with 10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
The focus of Java EE 7 is on the cloud, and specifically it aims to bring Platform-as-a-Service providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, etc. The existing specifications in the platform such as JPA, Servlets, EJB, and others will be updated to meet these requirements. Java EE 7 continues the ease of development push that characterized prior ...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...