This is Part III in a series by 6fusion Co-founder and CEO John Cowan on the emerging trend of Cloud Brokerage and the impact it will have on the technology industry and markets. Be sure to check out Part I of the series here and Part II here.

The feedback and fallout from Part II of this post has been quite interesting.  I thought for sure the bulk of the flack I would have to take would be from the cloud vendor incumbents I said would be relegated to the world of retail cloud business.  But since I posted my perspective I’ve found myself digging in to the nature of the Total Addressable Market (TAM) for the Cloud Brokerage industry.

For those of you keeping score at home, I said the market for cloud brokerage is more that 10 times the market for cloud computing software and related services.

Yes, 10 times.

And it is because this market is so big that cloud brokerage will spawn the next generation of technology innovation.

But before I get to the underlying technologies that are on the horizon and necessary for the future that I, along with my collaborators, envision, let me first spend a few paragraphs to explain why I am not just pulling numbers out of my, um, ‘IaaS’.

On the 6fusion iNode Network the median server in production in the cloud is a quad core dual processor unit with an average of 4TBs of available storage.  Using this standard configuration, partners and customers yield approximately $42,000 per year in net billable proceeds. I would classify that number, give or take on either side of it, to be a reasonable annual revenue estimation.

IDC recently reported that the 2011 server shipments topped out at 8.3 million units.  At a $42K clip, that is a market growing by a healthy $350 billion each year.

But of course, as we all know, server shelf life is not exactly the same as what you’d expect from a box of Krusty-O’s from the Kwik-E-Mart.

A quick trip down the hall to Gary Morris’s office at 6fusion is always an educational adventure.  “Depreciation,” Gary explains, “is a systematic and rational process of distributing the cost of tangible assets over the life of those assets. US GAAP calls for depreciation of servers using the server’s cost, estimated useful life and residual value. Typically, computers, software and equipment are depreciated over a period of 1 to 5 years, with the average useful life being 3 years.”

If we take Gary’s use of the GAAP average as a multiplier, it means there is estimated to be over $1trillion in billable utility computing presently in use around the world.

The point here is that cloud brokerage is underpinned by the availability of both private and public compute, network and storage resources.  And it is this massive untapped market that will drive the next wave of innovation.

If the origins of the cloud business belonged to the innovation of companies like Amazon, Rackspace and VMware, then the future of the cloud brokerage belongs to a new cadre of agnostic intermediaries that will enable a true utility computing marketplace to flourish.

The unification of the market is what I refer to as the point in time at which cloud computing technologies in production today can be used to interface to the commodity market.  In order for that to happen, cloud brokerage as an industry must form and deliver the underlying technologies necessary to make a true market.

Just what are these technologies?  Let’s take a look at three areas of innovation that will underpin the future of the utility computing.

Cloud brokerage technologies are best considered in the context of supply, demand and delivery.

Universal Resource Metering: Quantification of Demand and Supply

I delivered a presentation in Asia a few weeks ago and I opened with a slide that had two simple definitions:  Utility and Commodity.

A Utility, I paraphrased, “is a service provided by organizations that are consumed by a public audience.”

A Commodity, according to common definition, “is a class of goods or services that is supplied without qualitative differentiation.”

Theoretically, you can have a utility without it necessarily being commodity.  But it rarely ever works that way because in order to have a utility in the way we think about the utilities we consume every day, you must have scale.   And in order to achieve scale, the utility must be pervasive and uniform.  One should not require any special skills in order to use it.  It must be simple and consistent to use.   Think about your interaction with things like power or water services or subscribing to the Internet.

Utility is a word used quite often to describe the cloud.   In a post a couple months ago Simon Wardley aptly explained the difference between the cloud and a computer utility.  The difference, says Wardley, is really only that “cloud was simply a word used by people to explain something that really wasn’t well understood to people who were even more confused than they were.”

So is the cloud really a computer ‘utility’?  Not yet.

You see, what the cloud is missing is the factor that truly negates qualitative differentiation – common measurement. You simply cannot claim something to be a true utility if every provider measures services differently.  Common utilities all share the characteristic of universal measurement.  Think about it.  Power. Water.  Energy.  The Internet.  Whatever.

A standardized unit of measurement for the computer utility will be one of the greatest innovations to come from the emerging market for cloud brokerage because it will establish basis from which a commodity market can emerge.

Cloud Infrastructure Federation: Tapping Global Supply

When you buy corn or wheat or soybeans by contract on a commodity exchange today, you don’t buy a brand.   You buy a commodity.  Cloud brokers of the future will move commodities, not brands.   Today, cloud brokers form ‘partnerships’ with service providers.   But for a true brokerage model to blossom, there can be no possibility for vendor discrimination.  Anyone that brings product to market can and should trade it.  The denial of interoperability cannot happen.

With this in mind true cloud brokers will overcome the interoperability hurdle through collaboration and cooperation.   This doesn’t mean ascribing to one API framework or another, regardless of how high and mighty the leading retail cloud properties might become.   It means absolving oneself from the politics of the API game completely.

The Underlying Transport System:  Delivering the Commodity

It doesn’t always happen, but when a commodity contract comes due, something must be delivered.   The party that holds the paper for a hundred thousand units of corn must be able to take possession of it.  Modern commodity markets are supported by an elaborate network of supply chain delivery systems – from tankers to trains and transport trucks.

The equivalent underlying transport system must exist for the cloud infrastructure market.

Commodity brokers don’t own the transport system for the market.   And for good reason.  However, if you subscribe to the early analyst view of cloud brokerage, they do.   The analysts see brokers facilitating the transaction and delivering the compute commodity itself.   To me, they either don’t fully grasp the potential of the broker or they are describing something all together different.

Cloud interoperability is not a new concept.  It has been bandied about the blogosphere for several years already.  The problem to date is that such movements have been nothing more than thinly veiled product sales pitches.  The cloud brokers of the future will drive the innovation to construct the underlying transport system to “connect the clouds.”

In the final part of this series I will explore the future state of cloud computing; a world where the immovable IT asset becomes movable in a commodity exchange.

• The Cloud Vendor and the Agnostic Intermediary
• The Immovable Asset Becomes Movable
• Cloudwashing the Cloud Brokerage