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A Great Source for Information about Software Quality  
# Tuesday, September 24, 2013
 
Software quality is a fundamentally important topic, one that I've written about some. I was recently clued in to the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference. I've never participated in this event (which is a shame--it looks really good), but I'm deeply impressed by the breadth and depth of the papers and presentations in their archives.

If you're interested in this area, I encourage you to take a look.

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Notes from CloudBeat 2013  
# Monday, September 16, 2013
 
I participate in quite a few cloud conferences, and CloudBeat is always one of the most interesting. CloudBeat 2013 was no exception. It's sponsored by VentureBeat, and so there's a Silicon Valley startup vibe mixed with a few big, established vendors.

This year's theme was "The Cloud Grows Up", which was perfect for where things are today. A few thoughts from the event:

• In the past, when people at cloud conferences wanted to refer to public cloud platforms in general, they'd say "Amazon". At this event, many speakers said "Amazon or Azure". With its Valley roots, CloudBeat is anything but Microsoft-friendly (the audience sported almost exclusively Macs and iPads), but Windows Azure is clearly getting more mindshare, even here. In public cloud platforms for enterprises, I think we're headed for a two-horse race. 
• Multiple vendors talked about being open, letting their customers avoid lock in. This left me wondering: Do these vendors think that enterprise IT leaders (the target audience for these claims) still fall for this? Surely their customers have all figured out that whatever a vendor says, it always wants to lock you in to its products. This isn't evil--it's a rational (even essential) business strategy. And while many IT leaders wish things were otherwise, everybody understands that they're not. So why do the vendor marketing people keep singing this old song? How gullible do they think their customers really are?
• There was lots of OpenStack love at the event. But OpenStack is the cloud generation's attempt to create a multi-vendor standard supported by multiple competing vendors. We've seen this movie many times, and we know how it usually ends: One or two vendors end up with a viable business using a customized version of the technology, often riding the "open" hype to make sales. If you're HP or IBM, both of whom came in dead last in Gartner's most recent IaaS Magic Quadrant (and both quite visible at this event), this strategy is probably your best shot at success. But customers are wise to claims of openness (see above), and so it's a challenging road to walk.

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Gartner's 2013 MQ for Public Cloud IaaS: Catching Up With Reality  
# Thursday, September 05, 2013
 
I love Gartner's Magic Quadrants. They do a great job of summarizing lots of useful information in a clear, simple way. (I also love the Gartner Hype Cycle for the same reason.) And for anybody interested in the cloud, the latest MQ for Public Cloud IaaS is essential reading.

But Gartner analysts are people, just like you and me. They have feelings and histories that influence their perspective. Looking at the 2013 IaaS MQ reminded me of this.

To get some perspective, here's the 2012 Magic Quadrant for public cloud IaaS:



Amazon Web Services is out in front, as it should be, but there are four other vendors in the Leaders quadrant.

Here's the 2013 MQ for public cloud IaaS, published just ten months later:




AWS is now way ahead, almost alone in the leaders quadrant. What's happened here?

One possibility is that AWS really has made that much progress in ten months, leaving its competitors in the dust. Another is that its competitors, including the former leaders, have stood still, letting Amazon widen its lead. But is it likely that either (or both) of these things were large enough to warrant such a big change in only ten months? No.

What's more likely is that Gartner's perception has caught up with reality. The 2012 MQ always bothered me--it just didn't reflect my experience. I spend much of my time in the cloud world, whether speaking at conferences or talking with enterprise IT leaders or working with cloud vendors. Everybody in this world knows that Amazon is the IaaS leader--there's no question. Yet even at the end of 2012, asking people who was second in IaaS usually produced a blank stare. Nobody else was even close.

While companies like Terremark, Savvis, CSC, and Dimension Data are fine organizations, they're primarily offering VMware-based enterprise cloud solutions. If you believe that the future likely belongs to what Gartner calls "best-effort" clouds (as I do), these companies (which mainly offer what Gartner calls "reliable" clouds) are barely in the same market as Amazon. And their public cloud market share in late 2012 was massively smaller than Amazon's, as it is today.

So why did Gartner put all of them in the 2012 Leaders quadrant? First, it was less clear then that enterprises would take to best-effort clouds. The reliable clouds provided by these other vendors looked like they might be a better choice. Just as important, for a group of Gartner analysts coming to the cloud from the virtualization market, VMware-based solutions were bound to look attractive. It's what everybody already had, and it was what the analysts knew.

Given all of this, I'd suggest that the Gartner 2013 MQ doesn't reflect change in AWS as much as it does change in Gartner's understanding of the market. It's the 2012 MQ that was off the mark; the 2013 version comes closer to reality.

A few more thoughts:

• Microsoft finally released its public cloud IaaS support in mid-2013, so it appears in the 2013 MQ for the first time. And Gartner got the positioning right: Windows Azure IaaS belongs in the Visionary quadrant today. The Ability to Execute axis is usually Microsoft's strength in an MQ, however, and since Gartner seems to think that the company's IaaS vision is strong, I'd be surprised if Microsoft doesn't move into the Leaders quadrant in the next iteration. With best-effort clouds for the enterprise, I expect to see a two-horse race between AWS and Windows Azure.
• The positioning of HP and IBM in the 2013 quadrant is nothing short of shocking. Anybody who believes that Gartner MQs reflect some kind of pay-to-play arrangement, that big vendors effectively buy their way into the Leaders quadrant, should pay close attention. I admire the analysts' courage in showing their honest opinions about a couple of very large Gartner clients.
• Google isn't included in this MQ because its public cloud IaaS offering, Google Compute Engine, is still in beta. If GCE one day leaves beta, my guess is that Gartner will fit it into the Niche Players quadrant. The reason for this is simple: GCE supports only Linux, and for Gartner's enterprise clients, not having Windows is a non-starter for many mainstream scenarios.

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