I read about Nick Carr commenting on IBM putting their infrastructure software in Amazon EC2. He is comparing it with IBM's disastrous decision to leave IP rights of Microsoft-Dos with, well, MicroSoft. Is this recent decision really comparable?
In case of PC, in hind sight it appears that IBM had erroneously assumed that their micro-processor based PC was non commoditisable, whereas Microsoft correctly judged that anyone could assemble a PC using off-the-shelf microprocessors from Intel. So Microsoft retained IP on software which it could use to monopolise the commodity PC market.
So the question in this scenario is what is likely to be commoditised? Are EC2 services that unique that no-one else could replicate? What is the barrier to entry?
Certainly not technology. If my memory serves me right, IBM itself is big daddy of virtualisation and what it calls utility computing. It had developed first hypervisor called VM CP, which used to run on S/xxx mainframes. In recent times, I remember using IBM provided Linux image on a mainframe in 2001 to do some personal project (I was trying to do some code visualisation into model using open source tools on IBM provided Linux image.) IBM had provisioned that image in 24 hours.
So what is it? My guess is IBM is using EC2 to hook users onto its IP and then move them to a different Cloud (possibly its own). I think IBM is still not worked out the business model around its own cloud offering for SMB. Not a bad thing. It will surely standardise cloud computing space and make enterprise scale software stack available even to SMBs. It might hasten uptake of private cloud offerings too. So everyone will benefit. It would be interesting to see how this works out in next few years. I am definitely going to watch the progress.
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Friday, February 13, 2009
IBM in cloud.
I read about Nick Carr commenting on IBM putting their infrastructure software in Amazon EC2. He is comparing it with IBM's disastrous decision to leave IP rights of Microsoft-Dos with, well, MicroSoft. Is this recent decision really comparable?
In case of PC, in hind sight it appears that IBM had erroneously assumed that their micro-processor based PC was non commoditisable, whereas Microsoft correctly judged that anyone could assemble a PC using off-the-shelf microprocessors from Intel. So Microsoft retained IP on software which it could use to monopolise the commodity PC market.
So the question in this scenario is what is likely to be commoditised? Are EC2 services that unique that no-one else could replicate? What is the barrier to entry?
Certainly not technology. If my memory serves me right, IBM itself is big daddy of virtualisation and what it calls utility computing. It had developed first hypervisor called VM CP, which used to run on S/xxx mainframes. In recent times, I remember using IBM provided Linux image on a mainframe in 2001 to do some personal project (I was trying to do some code visualisation into model using open source tools on IBM provided Linux image.) IBM had provisioned that image in 24 hours.
So what is it? My guess is IBM is using EC2 to hook users onto its IP and then move them to a different Cloud (possibly its own). I think IBM is still not worked out the business model around its own cloud offering for SMB. Not a bad thing. It will surely standardise cloud computing space and make enterprise scale software stack available even to SMBs. It might hasten uptake of private cloud offerings too. So everyone will benefit. It would be interesting to see how this works out in next few years. I am definitely going to watch the progress.
In case of PC, in hind sight it appears that IBM had erroneously assumed that their micro-processor based PC was non commoditisable, whereas Microsoft correctly judged that anyone could assemble a PC using off-the-shelf microprocessors from Intel. So Microsoft retained IP on software which it could use to monopolise the commodity PC market.
So the question in this scenario is what is likely to be commoditised? Are EC2 services that unique that no-one else could replicate? What is the barrier to entry?
Certainly not technology. If my memory serves me right, IBM itself is big daddy of virtualisation and what it calls utility computing. It had developed first hypervisor called VM CP, which used to run on S/xxx mainframes. In recent times, I remember using IBM provided Linux image on a mainframe in 2001 to do some personal project (I was trying to do some code visualisation into model using open source tools on IBM provided Linux image.) IBM had provisioned that image in 24 hours.
So what is it? My guess is IBM is using EC2 to hook users onto its IP and then move them to a different Cloud (possibly its own). I think IBM is still not worked out the business model around its own cloud offering for SMB. Not a bad thing. It will surely standardise cloud computing space and make enterprise scale software stack available even to SMBs. It might hasten uptake of private cloud offerings too. So everyone will benefit. It would be interesting to see how this works out in next few years. I am definitely going to watch the progress.
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