HostingCon 2011 Round-Up – A Collaboration of Hosting Leaders
Submitted by Morphlabs on August 16, 2011
By now, we hope everyone has recovered from a jam-packed showing at HostingCon in San Diego. We were pleasantly surprised by what an international gathering it turned out to be. Many of the attendees who stopped by our booth were from outside the United States, and we were heartened to know that the same conversations about virtualization and private clouds are unfolding in the world over.
We thought we’d share some of our top observations from the floor:
HostingCon attendees speak with the Morphlabs team.
Vendors are seeking partnerships – We have long believed that successful cloud implementation benefits from a healthy ecosystem and that no one provider can do it on their own. This is what has driven us to partner with the likes of Nexenta, Dell, and Arista, who provide best-of-breed solutions in their area of expertise and were well-represented at the show. To this end, we saw software vendors looking to partner with data center providers, data center providers looking for value added solutions, and cloud providers looking for partner data centers. We feel so strongly about the need for solid partners that we have a panel on the topic being pitched for SXSW right now.
IaaS and DIS (Dynamic Infrastructure Services) are driving adoption – Even though SaaS consumes the largest current portion of cloud dollars, most organizations are still struggling to virtualize if not get their cloud infrastructure strategy in place with PaaS growing at an admirable clip.
The Hosting World is evolving – It’s a fascinating time to be in the hosting industry. Due to the upheaval being caused by the 500 pound gorilla known as Amazon Web Services (AWS), there was much more camaraderie and continuity between the various hosting providers. Nowhere was this more evident than the Save Hosting meet-up hosted by Christain Dawson of ServInt. The industry landscape is going to be wildly different in a few years, but the majority of the participants won’t sit around idly watching the revolutionary changes. The pertinent question for the industry is how to compete in the market quickly and present a solution that has added value beyond just public IaaS.
Customers need lower barriers to entry – Speakers from Rackspace to Dell repeated the refrain that there is real business value in simplifying and rightsizing. If OpenStack is too difficult to implement, it doesn’t matter how attractive it is. The top three requirements we heard were:
1. Easy to deploy
2. Great performance
3. Best price performance in terms of power and space
The (digital) universe is expanding – It’s no surprise to anyone that with email, social and mobile applications growing exponentially as companies engage with their clients in new ways, cloud scalability and elasticity are required to keep up with utilities like data processing, storage, and management. It’s Jevon’s Paradox all over again. Being competitive in this environment means adopting cloud quickly.
Finally, a Thank You – Our (party) partners, Nexenta, put together a fantastic soiree that was attended by a who’s who of the industry. The tapas and sangria were a great cap to a opportunity-filled event.
Did you find the same truths surfacing at the show? Have you observed these trends happening in your industry and market at-large? Let us know.
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