The Value of Workload-Aware Management

A couple of weeks ago, I dropped by the Intel Developer Forum to present a session and listen in on a few others. As always in these types of shows, I learned quite a bit. Most strikingly although, I was reminded of something in other words probably quite obvious to many of you: Consumer interest in cloud computing will not be letting up any time in the near future.

Me: IBM Workload Deployer is one among many of a growing wave of cloud management solutions. How do you differentiate the focus and business value of it versus the myriad of other solutions out there?

Marc: I think VMware has built a very compelling set of capability in the virtualization space.  I think the main difference between VMware's suite and IBM Workload Deployer is the perspective from which the environments are managed.  VMware puts the administrator in the position of thinking about infrastructure from the ground up.  The administrator is thinking about virtual images, hypervisors, and scripts.  In IBM Workload Deployer, we think about things from the perspective of the app, because that's ultimately what the business cares about.  By providing a declarative model through which an application can be instantiated and managed, we feel we deliver a deeper value proposition to customers, through workload-aware management.

Marc: I think most users are currently looking at the broad picture of cloud computing, and have been adopting primarily in the private cloud realm.  There are several reasons for this.  One reason is that many clients have a large set of hardware resources which amount to sunk cost that needs to be leveraged.  Another reason is around data security concerns in off-premises clouds, and nevertheless another reason is around the human factor of comfort, which has taken time to develop around off-premise cloud models.  Nevertheless, businesses have become increasingly comfortable with various sources of outsourcing in recent years, especially in mission critical areas involving very sensitive data.  Just look at IBM's Strategic Outsourcing business, which handles entire IT operations for many large businesses.  I think that trend will continue in the area of cloud computing, and will lead to more public and ultimately hybrid cloud computing adoption.  In order to get to hybrid cloud computing, I see much of the focus and technology being associated with data security, workload portability, and license transferability between private and public.  When this space reaches fruition, customers will be able to enjoy true elastic economics in a computing model that allows a mixture of owning and renting compute resources and software licenses.