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Nothing cloudy about clouds

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CIOL Bureau
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PUNE: Would a company specializing in internal cloud compete with someone on the side of external cloud? How does an IT virtualization services provider view a SaaS player – competition or otherwise?

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Cloud Computing is catching on phenomenally and ironing out CIO headaches of managing and investing in huge IT infrastructures while the same can be floated over a cloud of remote IT resources that are optimized in a virtual or Web infrastructure to deliver pay-per-use scenarios. But what happens when IaaS (IT as a service) stands in the same cubicle as SaaS (Software as a service)?

It’s different terms by different vendors, to start with as explained by B S Nagarajan, senior technology consultant, VMware, the specialist player in virtualization. “There is SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS (Platform as a service). Best examples of SaaS are Salesforce or Google while Amazon best illustrates PaaS. Then VMware best describes IaaS. We won’t replace a SaaS guy but would rather help an enterprise reach more smoothly and speedily to a SaaS environment.”

Explaining the difference further he says,” Typically in an enterprise, there are islands of IT as various departments like Sales or Finance or Manufacturing deploy IT at different times and in different ways. VMware helps transform these silos for a cloud-ready scenario. We don’t run applications or data centers like the other cloud players. We infact, transform the internal IT environment to a degree where the external cloud person can take over without making any big changes. Thus, instead of going through the process of linking an older data center to external cloud, we help by first changing it to internal cloud, after which it can smoothly go over to external cloud.”

He was speaking at the sidelines of a press conference announcing the launch of VMware vSphere TM 4, specially unveiled for SMB IT environments.