Europe at the time looked like as good a place as any when traditional filters were applied.  There is a good swath of the market that speaks our language.  It’s not generally too far removed from North America from a support perspective (at least not as far removed as some other regions).  The acumen for cloud is generally pretty high and the potential to tap available talent seems strong.

But every time I brought the subject of Europe up, I would encounter a number of objections for young companies like 6fusion.   As I sit here about to kick off my company’s foray into the European market I was reminded of some conversations I had as I was working on the company’s course trajectory a little more than a year ago.

First there was the logic to consider among the Analyst community.  I’ll call this “The Macro Theory”.   It runs something like this: Although EMEA generally runs a tight second to North America in terms of market projections, the general consensus is that APAC will leapfrog EMEA.  The theory is that the Total Addressable Market (TAM) in APAC is much larger and the propensity for that market to “skip” an evolutionary step or two to leverage the cloud is much greater.    And the problem is magnified further by EMEA’s regulatory quandaries.  The risk, as it was put to me, is that I could be potentially investing in a region with questionable growth and one about to fall to a distant third place among the developing regions for cloud computing.

Sheesh.  Sounds pretty scary.

Next is what I call “The Lemming’s Guide to Market Planning”.   Domain experts in this category suggested the behavioral patterns of other players in the industry suggest the Analysts might be correct.  Peers in the cloud software business seemed to be flocking to APAC as though it was definitely the place to be for the cloud rapture.   Recent acquisitions in the industry showed visible undertones about the importance of the APAC market as a deal driver.

Fair enough.

But if I can be accused of anything, I can definitely be accused of not giving a sh…., um,  hoot about how others go about their business.   Blazing new trails is part of our entrepreneurial DNA at 6fusion.

So onward I pressed.

I spent some time in Europe and listened to resident experts talk about the challenges they faced.   I learned a lot about two major objections to investing in the region:

1. There is a serious financial crisis in the EU which is breeding uncertainty at a rapid pace and;
2. Regulations about data privacy and data residency were not conducive to supporting many cloud models and the idea of open systems seemed completely counter intuitive.

I couldn’t argue so much with the first point, so I conceded to avoid federating 6fusion iNodes in Greece or Italy in the near term, nor will I put my company into hock with Germany!

But… it’s the second problem that I saw as very intriguing.  I can see how most emerging cloud companies would examine the region and basically throw up all over the place when they saw the way in which most European authorities treated data residency.    As illustrated in a recent EuroCloud publication, there remains a lot of legal and regulatory plumbing yet to be done before the full advantages of cloud can be leveraged.   Certainly it is more work than most young companies would ever entertain – and for good reason.

But not me.

You see, 6fusion emerged as a company built around technology designed to satisfy a customer base in the offshore Caribbean.   I would argue you don’t know anything about data residency control until you deal with the subject in the context of companies whose very livelihood is based on financial and other data remaining firmly planted in remote places like Bermuda or the Cayman Islands (I lived in worked in both countries over a 12 year period).  And no, I’m not talking about tax cheats, porn peddlers and online bookies.   I’m talking about the world’s multi-nationals spanning the finance, investment, insurance and re-insurance verticals.

Coming from this pedigree it was hard for me to dramatize the challenge the European market poses. To me the challenge of data control, data residency and export as not so much of a problem.  It is an opportunity.  In fact, I see it as every reason why 6fusion would prioritize expansion into Europe above other important regions.  As time goes on what we’ll see is simply that the way we think about cloud fits very well with the way European regulators and businesses view data control.

And it would appear the market in Europe is not exactly waiting around to usurped by other more creative regimes to eat its lunch.

It’s with this view that we’ll be making landfall next week at Cloud Expo Europe to showcase our wares to the combatants of the cloud war across the pond.   And with the help of some major strategic partners we’ll be launching our European presence in a big way in the weeks to come.

The post Why I’m Bullish on Cloud in Europe appeared first on 6fusion.

Part I:  The Analysts Weigh In

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has established a working paper on the subject of cloud brokerage, signaling the importance of a movement that is taking shape inside the cloud computing industry as a whole.

The NIST working document describes the Cloud Brokerage success criteria as follows:

A cloud-user wishes to carry out an action on cloud-provider-1 using a federated interface, with no direct knowledge of cloud-provider-1 commands or interfaces. A cloud-management-broker offers the cloud-user a federated interface to multiple cloud-providers through a human user interface, an application programming interface or both.  The cloud-user selects desired cloud-provider-1 resources, action and action parameters using the cloud-management-broker interface.  The cloud-management-broker collects and marshals the selected action and parameters from the cloud-user‘s selection and issues the desired command to cloud-provider-1 using cloud-provider-1 native interface.

The idea of cloud brokerage warranted enough noise to be covered in detail within the analyst community in 2011.   However, depending with whom you subscribe, cloud brokerage has very different meanings.  While there has been definite progress on the behalf of the analyst community, I think the potential for what this model could mean for the cloud computing market goes much deeper.

To be clear, I believe the role of what I am calling the “infrastructure broker” will be the most significant movement in the computing industry since the advent of virtualization and cloud.

Before I get into the immense complexities of that statement, let’s take a look a few perspectives from key industry analysts:

Gartner:

According to Gartner research expert Benoit Lheureux, the role of the Cloud Service Broker (CSB) is to “aggregate and add value to cloud services by providing a single point of entry to different types of cloud services.”   Gartner goes on to illustrate some key defining characteristics of a cloud broker.  According to Gartner, a CSB is a CSB if they genuinely perform:

• Aggregation across VARS and IT Distributors
• Integration with Systems Integrators
• Customization for SI’s and Professional Services organizations

Gartner’s definition of Cloud Brokerage is by far the lightest among the analysts.  If you believe Lheureux, Cloud Brokerage is really just the modernization of the IT channel.

451 Group:

451 generally consider the category of CSB a part of broader market called cloud on-ramps.   In addition to providing some sort of provisioning technology, CSBs differ “in that they provide a value-added economic function, which matches workloads to the best execution venues.”

While I think 451 only provides cursory attention to cloud brokerage as a concept, the are at least more directionally correct in the sense that they see Brokerage providing a level of sophistication that is unique in the delivery of cloud services – namely the concept of ‘workload matching’.

Forrester:

I think Forrester has done the best job among the research outfits when it comes to taking a seriously deep look at the CSB market definition.   Forrester sees the CSB
playing a pivotal role in the future of the entire industry.   Analyst Stefan Reid’s taxonomy picture does a fantastic job of identifying the interaction of different players.

According to Forrester, “the simple broker model gains value only by comparing similar cloud provider options and using dynamic provisioning based on the actual spot prices of these resources.”  This sounds similar to 451 and Gartner in direction and tone.

But Forrester goes on to elaborate on what they see the as the evolution of the brokerage model.  “The full broker [model] goes far beyond [the simple broker].  It uses “cloud bursting” to provide IT users with higher value for a lower price.”  Cloud Bursting, Forrester explains, “is the dynamic relocation of workloads from private environments to cloud providers and vice versa.”   I’ll admit a slight sigh when I hear the cloud ‘bursting’ term (again), but I think Forrester has a great grasp on the technical role of the broker.

Gartner sees brokering as little more than modern distribution.   451 sees the concept as something they instinctually must cover but the details are hazy.   Forrester has obviously put the most thought into their analysis.  But the consistent underlying theme within these analysts is that brokerage insinuates a model whereby vendors inserting themselves and their technology between supplier and consumer to provide a layer of transactional value.

The debate and discussion goes much deeper than this and the potential for the cloud broker is much more profound.

In Part II of this post we will take a closer look at the role of the intermediary and who is likely to take up this position in the market.

The post Cloud Brokerage and the Future of the IT Utility appeared first on 6fusion.

For our company and for the industry, 2010 was a huge year.   We completed our Series A round of venture financing, relocated the company to the coveted North Carolina State University’s Centennial Campus and tripled the size of our team.  Meanwhile, the industry took meaningful steps toward maturity as mainstream private sector businesses and governments of all shapes and sizes began giving IaaS a very serious look.   If 2010 was the year of formal organization, 2011 will be the year of some serious and meaningful growth.  Not just for our company and our technology, but for the IaaS market as a whole.

In a post I wrote recently I did my best to explain some of the core characteristics that would be central to IaaS achieving mass adoption as the technology revolution marches forward.  While I think it’s very difficult for anyone to offer up accurate predictions for the year ahead of any fledgling market, there are some specific ‘themes’ that I think, as we look back a year from now, will have clearly emerged as bell weather trends in the industry.

To borrow a format from Peter King, one of my favorite sports writers, here are the six things (6 things, 6fusion, get it?) I think I think (for the cloud biz in 2011):

1. Hybridization Will Prove Critical to Enterprise Adoption.  I’ve been to the edge and back and I have a few words of wisdom to share with my peers about the Enterprise cloud.  Unless what you are doing bridges a gap between what exists inside the four walls of the enterprise data center and what might safely and securely exist outside of those four walls you are just another GUI in the Red Ocean peddling the same wares we’ve seen for years.  Hybridization is something enterprise buyers will use to separate the crème from the crop in 2011.
2. Regional Clouds Unite.  The arms race among regional managed hosting providers to beef up for cloud services was evident in 2010.  But the silo approach to building up IaaS on a regional basis will prove difficult if not impossible to compete on scale – and it won’t take long to figure this out.  In 2011 expect to see the concept of broad-based IaaS federation become a much more prominent theme as owners of regional facilities and compute partner to create scale and increase market size in the quest to truly monetize their resources and compete with the national players.
3. The Ecosystem is Bigger Than the Organism.  The IaaS industry is beginning to realize that the creation and quantification of IaaS demand is much more important than the creation of supply.  Its one thing to have the capability to power or enable the creation of IaaS resources, but it is entirely another to drive revenue and margin to the cloud.   The emergence of business ecosystems will be a consistent theme for the coming year because partnering is the key to success in a nascent market.  In 2011 you will see more and more eyebrow-raising deals announced based on ‘synergistic’ partnerships – partnerships that drive mutual revenue and margin between companies that are bound by the common interest of leveraging, distributing and powering IaaS.
4. It’s All About the Channel.  Building a global business tackling one end-user customer at a time doesn’t scale if your business is supposed to compete with the market pioneers.  In order to generate a serious outbound push to globalize IaaS the cost of business acquisition will be too high for almost every player.  In 2011 IaaS vendors will wake up to the fact that they need help in order to scale revenues and ultimately generate the ROI they are promising shareholders.  Queue the channel gold rush.
5. Communities Will Emerge.  I subscribe to the notion that one day every business in every vertical will consume a form of public cloud – but we are not anywhere close to this reality.  Large scale IaaS operated by a trusted third party and made available to a select group of common-interested stakeholders is a concept that has legs.  Trust me on this one.  Building out community clouds will emerge in 2011 as one of, if not the most important, concepts to help accelerate IaaS adoption.
6. A Course Will Be Charted for an IaaS Futures Market.  If you don’t subscribe to the notion that the final destination for this ride is a commodity exchange for compute, stop and take a look around.  Spot markets emerged in 2010, much to the surprise of many industry pundits.  But spot markets, as novel as they are, do not a true market make.  The real money and the real opportunity are in futures trading.  There are forces at work on this as I type away, and although you won’t actually see compute on a major exchange in 2011, do expect to see this theme to creep it’s way into mainstream IaaS thinking.

Ok, so with the predictions for themes and threads out of the way, I’ll conclude this post with the 6 things I’ll be watching closer than my wallet at a pick-pocket’s convention as 2011 progresses:

1. Shifting Big Iron:  Companies like HP and IBM have yet to emerge with serious IaaS plays and if you read the tea leaves they won’t any time soon.  I’ll be watching to see if any of the whales in the pool make a splash in the IaaS business.
2. Processor Plays:  Intel made huge moves in the cloud in 2011 and you don’t need your tarot cards out to see where they are going.  Anyone know what AMD is thinking these days?  I’ll be watching to see if this gentle giant makes any moves that can rival thier kool-aid-drinking-all-in-pot-committed competitor.
3. Government Clouds:  The GSA announced a major IaaS initiative announcing a schedule of vendors that could be purchased from their schedule.  But will these IaaS vendors truly make any money this way?  I’m not so sure.  My personal opinion is that the money is at a different level of the Public Sector.  Can’t wait to see!
4. Hypervisor Competition:  KVM is rocketing up the relevance chart.  No doubt.  I’ll be watching to see how VMware plans to keep it’s toe-hold on the hypervisor market as IaaS enablement begins to drive more and more purchasing decisions.
5. Network Providers:  The accelerated adoption of cloud services will put a big piece of the pie squarely in the hands of the network operators.  I will be watching to see how Network operators jockey to position themselves.  I don’t think it is a foregone conclusion that operators will follow the lead of companies like BT and DT.
6. Disclosure Watch:  As more and more private sector orgs make the move to the cloud, the greater the potential that something somewhere is going to go wrong.  I will be keeping a watchful eye on key disclosures and cloud failures which could dramatically stunt the industry’s pace of growth.

6fusion’s first webinar of our 2011 series called: “Make your 2011 New Year’s cloud Resolution Now”. I’ll be elaborating on some of these points and drilling down into how service providers can drive new business to kick the session off. Come join the discussion!

The post 6 Things I Think I Think for IaaS in 2011 appeared first on 6fusion.

The company is occupying space in the Venture IV building on the research park and technology campus.

“We are delighted to have 6fusion on campus,” said Dennis Kekas, associate vice chancellor of the Centennial Partnership office. “With its background in cloud computing and our research in that area, we think they are an ideal partner going forward.”

6fusion has developed an algorithm that radically simplifies the metering, consumption and billing of compute resources, called the Workload Allocation Cube (WAC). The company also has developed a platform called UC6, which provides a single pane-of-glass user interface for customers to dynamically provision cloud workloads internal or external to their organization.

“We spent a considerable amount of time with the team at Centennial Campus after we completed our relocation to the Research Triangle,” said John Cowan, CEO of 6fusion. “Centennial Campus is not only an exciting, intellectually stimulating place to locate an entrepreneurial venture – it’s also a unique venue that allows us to partner on research and development facilities in a campus atmosphere that is more than just office space.”

6fusion makes iNode computing power available exclusively through IT service providers, independent software vendors and managed service providers. The company uses iNodes to build and launch ‘cloud’ based services to its user communities and customers worldwide. The company bridges the gap between supply and demand of utility computing resources with the company’s software technology called UC6. UC6 is a single console that handles all of the metering and billing of the “infrastructure” and deployment and control of customer “applications.”

In addition to the corporate relocation, 6fusion has also partnered with NC State’s Institute for Next Generation IT Systems (ITng) to develop collaborative research initiatives. ITng is also located on Centennial Campus.

“ITng is a perfect fit for 6fusion’s long term R&D program,” said 6fusion co-founder and CTO Delano Seymour.

The post PR: New Kids on Campus – 6fusion Partners with NC State University appeared first on 6fusion.

The $3 million round, which is the company’s first institutional financing, was led by Intersouth Partners, and will be used to add to its senior executive team and expand research and development as the company continues to scale. “6fusion is growing at a fierce pace,” said John Cowan, co-founder and CEO of 6fusion. “Intersouth is an important part of our future and will be a crucial partner in helping to enable our success in what has become a quickly evolving industry.”

6fusion has developed an algorithm that radically simplifies the metering, consumption and billing of compute resources, called the Workload Allocation Cube (WAC). The WAC is the most granular and universal metric for metering and delivering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The company also has developed a platform called UC6, which provides a single pane of glass user interface for customers to dynamically provision cloud workloads internal or external to their organization.

Katrin Burt and Mitch Mumma of Intersouth will join the company’s Board of Directors. “IT managers and service providers are seeking an efficient and simple cloud strategy – one that can allow for the scaling up and down of cloud resources while maximizing ROI,” said Katrin Burt, a partner with Intersouth Partners. “6fusion allows partners and customers to access their resources and manage them from anywhere in the world in a seamless, unified fashion.”¬¬

The company will be temporarily housed at Intersouth’s offices in Durham, North Carolina until it finalizes its new headquarters location.

6fusion considered every major market before deciding to relocate the company to Research Triangle Park. “The Research Triangle has a rich history of strong infrastructure development and a cadre of growing companies, which makes it an exciting place to locate our company,” said Cowan. “As cloud computing continues to redefine IT delivery, we look forward to playing an important role in establishing the Research Triangle as a key location for the industry.”

About 6fusion
6fusion is a new venture created by a group of IT professionals to help other IT and telecommunications service providers enter and adapt to the new and profitable world of managed or hosted technology services by co-creating value and providing a single Utility Computing platform from which they can build, launch and license profitable long-term revenue initiatives. 6fusion’s unique, patent-pending technology creates a single unit of measurement for calculating and billing x86 computing consumption for any software application run on any hardware platform. Through a combination of technology, investments and partnerships with world class data centers, 6fusion provides unprecedented ROI and time to market for VARs, MSPs, SaaS Providers, ISPs, ISVs and end customers.

Contact
John Cowan, CEO
6fusion
jcowan@6fusion.com
919.917.5150

Suzanne Cantando
Intersouth Partners
suzanne@intersouth.com
919.493.6640, ext. 108

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Cowan’s keynote presentation, “Get Plugged Into Your Future,” will explore how Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and IT solution providers can use utility computing to build a profitable and innovative IT services business in the cloud, and how this technology can deliver more robust solutions at a lower cost to their customers. In addition, Cowan will discuss the impact and evolution of cloud computing and how utility computing will fundamentally change the way IT services are delivered and consumed in the business world.

“Utility computing is defining the future of IT services and changing how businesses and consumers market, sell, support and use IT computing power,” says Cowan. “The cloud computing innovations we are seeing today represent the tip of the iceberg for delivering an easier and more cost effective solution. The innovation behind utility computing will take the cloud to a new level of sophistication and scalability, bringing a more simplified, secure and affordable means of deploying new technologies and applications to market.”

Cowan’s presentation will also outline the key success factors for using utility computing, as well as operational best practices for MSPs to consider as more IT solutions migrate off premise and into the cloud.

The Ingram Micro 2009 Seismic Partner Conference, “Make Your Mark,” brings together more than 300 MSPs, leaders and influencers within the IT industry to engage in candid business discussions, share best practices and explore high-impact IT service trends. As a presenter, 6fusion will lend its expertise on how IT channel partners can successfully navigate and deploy the hundreds of cloud-based computing solutions emerging, such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) – all of which promise compelling value propositions and business benefits.

Launched in the US market in Jan. 2009, 6fusion’s technology federates independent data centers and makes the collective available compute power available for use by traditional IT service providers, MSPs and ISV’s and their customers. Using 6fusion’s software, called UC6, channel partners can track computing consumption in real time and perform historical reporting functions. In addition, UC6 agents can be deployed to physical or virtual servers located on premise with no overhead to instantly determine the projected cloud computing costs.
In support of its channel partners’ success, 6fusion has also developed training and support exclusively for the IT channel. These resources work to eliminate the risk and uncertainty of utility computing and enable a viable new business alternative for MSPs to adopt and use in today’s challenging marketplace.

“We have made the cost of complex computing as easy to predict and understand as an everyday electricity bill, which means we are uniquely positioned to enable channel partners to help their clients realize the true benefits of cloud computing,” concludes Cowan. “We’re thrilled to share our insight with Ingram Micro’s Seismic Partners and look forward to a great event.”

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