Met with the head of cloud computing at a big 5 consulting firm recently

What an interesting meeting:

I met the head of Cloud offerings who also sets strategy globally (except Japan) for Cloud in one of the big five consulting firms the other day.

This was a discovery meeting, and he started out going through their offerings for cloud to set a context for the conversation - he broke these areas down into the following:

1) Intrastructure Services - Shared data centers and services, hardware, networks, storage - he summarised this area by calling it a Compute Grid or Compute resource (they don't use real grid)
2) Application Services - like email, etc
3) Content Services - he referred to this as an iTunes model where people could obtain content from the cloud on a subscription type model
4) Activity Services - he spoke about this as effectively outsources process (like payrole)

He was quite scathing of the term Cloud and said that it was just a new way of pricing and positioning hosting services - I found I agreed with him in many respects. He said that model 1 above was the most common cloud service for them and it really was just a managed service wrapped in a new commercial model.

The chap went on to describe the areas that they want to work and spoke about the levels of their data centers - I was not fully aware of these classifications - but looked it up after - he said that their data centers were classed as Tier 1, 2, 3 and 4 - if you ever talk to someone about Cloud it probably would be a good idea to look the below over:

The four levels are defined, and copyrighted, by the Uptime Institute, a Santa Fe, New Mexico-based think tank and professional services organization. The levels describe the availability of data from the hardware at a location. The higher the tier, the greater the accessibility. The levels are:

Tier Level	Requirements
1	Single non-redundant distribution path serving the IT equipments Non-redundant capacity components Basic site infrastructure guaranteeing 99.671% availability
2	Fulfils all Tier 1 requirements Redundant site infrastructure capacity components guaranteeing 99.741% availability
3	Fulfils all Tier 1 & Tier 2 requirements Multiple independent distribution paths serving the IT equipments All IT equipments must be dual-powered and fully compatible with the topology of a site's architecture Concurrently maintainable site  infrastructure guaranteeing 99.982% availability
4	Fulfils all Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 requirements All cooling equipment is independently dual-powered, including chillers and Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems Fault tolerant site infrastructure with electrical power storage and distribution facilities guaranteeing 99.995% availability

What interested me about this point was he said that almost no data centers were Tier 4, and most only ever got as good as T3. He said that Government clouds anywhere in the world should be at T3 or T4 - which would preclude many of the "public" type clouds like Google and Amazon. He said that they would not compete with these public clouds.

He said they used virtualisation software and were happy with that product expecially as they claimed to have solved the generic problem that most virtualisation software has with disk access.

We then discussed the financial model of Government Cloud and the lack of commercial models that he said made sense. He said that they charged one of three ways for cloud:

1) Capacity - simple model, you pay for what you use in terms of bandwidth, storage and processing power.
2) Service Charge - based on per transaction - this was very successful for their managed cloud offering - and one that they were finding was growing better than most.
3) Hosting charge - just a pure single cost hosted model.

Next we spoke more about government cloud projects globally and the general expectation that most would be a complete failure. There is such a lack of funding and lack of internal agreement between government departments in most countries that coupled with a general lack of vendor support for the model that this government wide cloud programmes would likely stall during 2011.

Next we talked about the European standards that are coming for data centres that were likely to be made law and disrupt all European government cloud projects.

We had much discussion about many areas after this not suitable for a blog, but at a certain point the topic prompted me to steer the conversation to GreenIT and whether he saw this as a better way to position cloud services - and he very much agreed and then gave an example of getting money for a project by classifying the savings in Tonnes of Carbon per Day

I was interested in this and we had a 15 minute conversation about software and cloud as green IT - he felt strongly that this was an interesting and useful way to work things.

Finally, based on all of the above I asked a blunt question - quote:

"Do you believe there is room for innovation in this space considering the current government cuts and confusion you have described over the last 45 minutes?"

He leapt on this question "absolutely there is!" - I then said if businesses managed to realise their cloud offering in government and that there was general agreement reached on data center standards (which included data sharing standards) - could he see a day where data analytics could be a service offered?

He got quite animated at this point and said "now wouldn't that be interesting" - I agreed and wondered out loud what certain government agencies (fraud and security) would be able to do with cross stream analysis of data from multiple departments hosted in parts of a Government Cloud? (I had Complex Event Processing in mind)

All in all a very valuable and insightful meeting - I wanted to share it on the blog.