Companies to watch: Cloudkick

Watch this company: Cloudkick.

I was at the IDC Directions09 recently where much -- almost all -- of the talk was about cloud computing and virtualization as the most disruptive technologies since the rise of the Web twenty years ago. This event took place the day after Cisco dropped its
usual courtly politeness and elbowed into the virtualization and blade server market once the turf of IBM, Dell and Hewlett-Packard. And the day after the IDC meeting, the Wall Street Journal reported that IBM was ready to buy Sun. What's going on here and what is missing?

What is going on is what IDC senior vice president and chief analyst Frank Gens said simply, "the cloud is where the money is," and provided this advice for vendors, "If you wait, you will be too late." I'd guess this means the chasm has been leaped, the
shark jumped, the hockey stick revenue graph is pointing straight up and you can throw in any additional strained marketing metaphor you care for.

What's missing? Let's start with traditional vendors thinking they can retool their products and strategies to become cloud friendly. Cisco is the most recent example of a company that is going to try to assemble an old gang of EMC, Accenture, BMC and Intel
into a pack that can first help you turn your aging ITinfrastructure into Amazon and then tie your cloud friendly internals into a sky full of outside clouds. Maybe.I needed a break from hearing about how the old is suddenly the new. I found a somewhat quiet spot at the Hynes Auditorium (where the IDC directions was being held) to speak on the phone for a bit with the execs at Cloudkick. Cloudkick is a Y Combinator funded company which is bringing a free (more on this later) network management dashboard to companies tying into cloud services from -- at this point -- Amazon's EC2 and Slicehost.

Alex Polvi had a background in systems administration and is now one of Cloudkick's founders. "Monitoring systems in a cloud is a lot different than monitoring systems in your own data center," he said.

I'd say monitoring a cloud service is hugely different than monitoring your own data center. Cloud services are all about capacity added on the fly, melding services from many services,
bandwidth, virtual servers in use and, of course, billing. Data center management is often about contrained I/O (server, storage or network), failing components and usually vain attempts to balance demand with capacity. Cloud services are, "like a revolution going through the plumbing industry," said Polvi where an entirely new way of doing business is sweeping through the IT industry.

He's right. The story from the traditional vendors is that they will first take all your existing infrastructure and -- for lack of a better term -- cloudify it. Once they have done that you will be ready for the big dance. I don't think the big challenge will necessarily be a technology hurdle, the bigger challenge is a business and process challenge where companies are going to have to rethink how they fund, monitor and deploy their computing resources to accomplish their business strategies.

And that is why companies should be spending time learning how services such as Cloudkick operate.

And as a final aside. The service is free, how will they make money? The idea, said Polvi,is to add premium services on top of the freebie as they get users. Now that sounds like a familiar refrain from the social networking world. TechCrunch also did a post about Cloudkick's business model.

Over at my website www.virtualizationfocus.com, I've included some screen shots of Cloudkick.

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