I am doing a couple of calls with some investors who are suddenly willing to bet on several open source parties or parties who have strong open source offerings. These parties could be open source vendors or could be parties that may have some open source or free hypervisors such as VMware Server, Hyper-V in their offerings.

This has several reasons:

Past experience: The 90s and .the dot com boom and bust clearly helped many open source companies such as Red Hat to weather the storm. Many perished and then next wave many will perish. Many companies are still stuck in the legacy mode. They are bound to perish! Many firms are breaking out of the older mode and are facing challenges but will survive to fight another battle.

Cloud Computing: More stuff is running on the web and more stuff will be serviced from the web. All will be run as CloudApps. That will be the Killer App. No one would really care how it all is provisioned. That's the way we ran our little websites a couple of years back and now its prime time for Apps. Cloud Computing may sound like a marketing hype and maybe to some extent it might also be one, it still is the path that is helping us go move towards the direction of Converged CloudBulk! IT and Business logic all bundled in the Cloud. who cares how it looks like, who cares on what platform its hosted. as long as the data is protected, compliant and regulatable!

Security, Compliance and Regulated Cloud Services will be the norm of tomorrow. Today banks, insurance firms are all still struggling to find a way to communicate with the weird security savvy, buzzword-guzzling consultants but tomorrow it will be the same people who will help them secure their data and future. And Cloud Security will help them achieve that, obviously if done correctly!

A lot of that knowledge and expertise is being built on open source technologies, it is being mixed in the proprietary application landscape and is all "mixed source" now.

Adaptive Consumerism: The more aspirational and individualistic the markets get, the more adaptive the providers have got to become. The more demanding the consumers get, the more on-demand you have to be. The more defiant the consumers get, the better "checkpoint billing model" will have to be established. They need to know before they need to tell their employees where they are spending too much! We need to help them sustain their business to help them sustain our businesses.


Consumers lead a very simple and pragmatic lives. They are cloers to reality everyday. The reality that changes everyday. The bank balances are affected everyday. A seamless, in-and out breathing real-time infrastructure will help not only drill down the consumers and continuously help them consolidate.

We need to help them become heroes everyday! They are just not heros, they are guests on our Cloud, and we intend to keep you on your chosen Cloud 9!



Continuous Consolidation and Capacity Planning: This pitch too is part of the adaptive infrastructure, real-time infrastructure, call it whatever you want to call it. It will be the only way to server the consumer. Consumers need to know at will where they stand and how they fare. They have the right to know what's running in their shops, they know very well what their core business is. We just provide them with all the capabilities to build their services on our Cloud and hope sincerely that they will also continue to have them serviced at our premises.

And should they leave us, we know for sure that they will always think good of us and come back to us. This is what the consumerism is all about, this is what commoditization ought to be, this is what all other industries have gone through and this is what Kondratieff wrote about.

Managed Cloud Services: Very easy to run and deploy and you will find that this industry will have open source virtualization hypervisors. This will have all kinds of combinations. Linux boxes with VMware server, Linux machines with their own inbuilt hypervisors (Xen, KVM etc) variant, Windows servers with Hyper-V (although it will be a hard sell to have that). Many bigger firms are announcing partnerships to run all proprietary apps and hypervisors in their Cloud Infrastructures but it really defeats the whole Cloud Computing model. Or lets put it this way, it really will not be that inexpensive offering through cheaper labor, automated engines.

Pragmatic times, Pragmatic Data Centers: We have to adapt a pragmatic approach, the welfare-nation kind approach that is so often ridiculed but so very well protects you on the long run. Data Centers need to be built with that mindset as well. We need to make sure that security, interoperability, compliance and heterogeneity will help us serve all classes of consumer segments. All are tenants and we have great hotels for all of them. They are all treated with respect and your safety is our concern.




A typical pragmatic data hotel will be in your neighborhood, some 15,000 miles away. All you know as a guest is that it will be safe and the stay will be fun.