Page 135 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

O VERCOMING RESISTANCE T O THE CL OUD

There are many reasons for businesses to adopt this de-
manding stance. Some cloud suppliers are specializing in set-
ting up and tearing down software test environments, while
capturing the test results (Skytap, SOASTA). Others may one
day prove to be good at executing online transactions and stor-
ing those results securely. Others might provide a rich, hosted

tool set for building software in the cloud (Salesforce.com, Mi-
crosoft, Engine Yard, IBM, Heroku) that will later be deployed
to run in the same cloud or on Amazon’s EC2. Such cloud
“frameworks” can automate many underlying tasks, such as
connection to the network or invoking specialized application
programming interfaces, a way to speed software development.
For virtualization vendors and cloud suppliers to pretend

that their customers need only one style of cloud computing
(their style) is a false front. Business end users thrive on a di-
versity of choices, and vendors who stand in the way of diver-
sity should be recognized as such and not rewarded. But the
propensity to lock customers in remains strong.
Amazon is not alone in hanging on to the strength of a
proprietary file format. The leading virtualization vendor
VMware’s VMDK is a proprietary format, with little informa-
tion in the public sphere about it. VMware is a case where its

technology strengths have kept customers from objecting too
much.
Microsoft, in turn, wants to forestall VMware’s dominance
of the important and growing virtualization market. One of
its few weapons for doing so is coordinating Hyper-V virtual
machine operation in its Azure cloud with Hyper-V virtual ma-
chine operation in the enterprise data center. Doing so would

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