Wasabi Roll: Cloud Competing, and the Winner is...

Now days, when one talks about cloud computing, they are presented with a wild array of providers, some with skills with an ax, some with a bow, either way, the choices are formidable. So how does one choose, who is out there that truly has skills to go the distance, to take the ring to the volcano? So Wasabi thought it was a good idea to reveal the leaders in this space to help build the short list.

So without further adieu Here are the leaders.

One Ring to Bind Them

When one speaks of the Amazon, few think of the 3900 mile river that originates from the Andes, treks through N. Brazil and empties into the Atlantic, they think of the retail giant that clear about 48 Billion in sales. This is no surprise, for once again, Amazon is living up to its name, for what it did in the retail market, it is poised to repeat in the Cloud market. Ironically, like the river, most of the power is silent moving swiftly below while presenting a serene calm at the surface, such is the way Amazon is taking the Cloud Market, swiftly and quiet. Meanwhile, as Google and Microsoft try to jockey for headlines touting the latest and greatest in “Cloud Computing”, Amazon has shoplifted the lead. Whoops, yes the low cost leader once again has shown that price makes might.

How do all these companies compare? Let's take a quick look at those most identified with the cloud (sorry, telecoms).

Company	P/E	3 -Year Revenue Growth	Trailing Year Profit Margin
Amazon	102.5	122.5%	2%
Rackspace	92.4	82.4%	6.8%
IBM	14.6	35.8%	14.8%
VMWare	54.3	125.5%	19.2%
Microsoft	10.7	53%	32.6%
Salesforce	7,798.0	91.6%	0.2%
Google	19.7	91.6%	25.7%
EMC	23.5	71.1%	12.3%

Sources: Yahoo! Finance and YCharts.

These numbers don't tell the whole picture, but it's interesting to note that the most highly valued company sports the slimmest profit margin. However, perhaps the P/E ratio is not how you look at it. Here is another perspective.

My Precious...

Google got the top nod from developers for scalability, reliability, uptime, and best value, and Garvin states that Google "shows more strength in both perceived capabilities and perceived ability to execute, and the adoption patterns for Google are stronger, going into the future." However, Google's offering via AppEngine is nowhere near as robust as Amazon's Web Services capabilities.

Azure! Bless You...

The big kahuna that is missing the mark is Microsoft, which, despite an army of developers interested in Azure and other cloud services, has yet to offer a production-ready product. Actually, AT&T and Microsoft, both have excellent potential: through existing physical infrastructure, however, both are late to the party. And, in a market that's evolving as quickly as this one, that's a significant handicap. And to make things worse, It remains to be seen if any vendor is even up to the expertise and vision of Amazon and Google, both of whom designed their infrastructure to support infinite scale.

You Shall Not Pass!

Now beyond the marketing hype, there are good deeds being done with this technology. Aided by Amazon’s cloud computing, researchers crunched, analyzed and sequenced massive amounts of information — something Cunningham could not have done on his own. It would have been far too expensive and taken too long. Work like this is going on at Google, Microsoft and other places too, but Amazon is by far the leader.

One customer, for example, wanted to run a virtual screening of 21 million chemical compounds.

"So you can imagine 50,000 laptops running this experiment. They didn't have to buy or provision or manage or cool or power any of those laptops, or set them up. They could just provision what they needed at a scale that they needed it," Wood says.

The entire experiment took about three hours, and the cost was less than $15,000. In contrast, Wood says, if the company had tried to do this in-house, it would have had to spend millions on computers, and the job might have taken years to complete.

Only one hand at a time can weild the One, and you know that well, so do not trouble to say we!

Amazon has established a booming business selling cloud computing services including processing, disk storage, and database software to what it says are hundreds of thousands of users, at hourly fees based on how much computing power they consume. "Amazon Web Services can be as big as our retail business, in the fullness of time," says Andy Jassy, the senior vice-president in charge of Amazon's cloud computing business, sitting in the converted Seattle hospital that's long served as Amazon's headquarters. Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 after Harvard Business School and has held a variety of jobs in the company, including as CEO Jeff Bezos' technical assistant. He launched Amazon Web Services in 2006, and has turned it into an unlikely success.

The New Mindset

Businesses are rethinking how they manage computing. Given the falling costs of transferring data over the Internet and companies' realization that managing complicated hardware and software building blocks is often a losing proposition, many are willing to outsource some of the job. In fact, some venture capital firms "have made it almost a precondition of investing in (startups)" that they use Amazon's cloud software, says Citigroup's Mahaney. The cloud can lead to sizable savings. InstaColl, a Bangalore (India)-based company that sells online productivity software, was able to save more than 60% on the cost of running the computing, storage, and networking behind its applications by using Amazon Web Services instead of having its own hardware, CEO Sumanth Raghavendra said. He said InstaColl's savings are higher than most companies would reap.

Don't Be A Fool of a Took

Amazon Web Services is, by all accounts, the largest cloud service provider by far, although good luck finding third-party numbers to verify that. Amazon, like most of the big cloud providers, doesn’t disclose much about current or planned data centers.

New research from Accenture analyst Huan Liu estimates that Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) runs on a whopping 450,000 servers. Amazon does not break out AWS revenue, but some say it could already be a billion dollar business. Indeed, the company's cloud services may ultimately eclipse Amazon's retail sales. In short, Big Data, small wallet, will decide who dominates the Cloud Market…

Source(s):

Wasabi Roll

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Cloud Competing, and the Winner is...

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