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The private in-house cloud model will not yield economies of scale as big as a will the hosted private cloud or the public cloud model, according to Sun's Krishna Subramanian. She is a senior director for cloud strategy and corporate development at the company.
While appealing to large companies of the Fortune 100 caliber, the internal enterprise cloud is expensive to build and operate. The biggest appeal of cloud computing is that it provides virtual IT infrastructure that is cheap to deploy precisely because the customer does not have to buy and support physical equipment.
“At Sun, we believe that the hosted private (cloud model) is going to be a big trend going forward,” Subraminian said at an IT industry event in Silicon Valley on Tuesday. The model alleviates security and compliance concerns associated with public cloud services, while allowing for the savings infrastructure outsourcing provides.
Subraminian was careful to note that the statement did not mean that Sun would take a position that the private cloud model is not a good idea. “If you, as a customer, want to set up a private cloud, clearly Sun can sell software and servers to do that,” she said. “As a vendor, we're not going to take a stance and say we're not going to support private clouds.”
Sun set up a business unit dedicated to cloud computing about two years ago.
“The reason we had to set up a separate business unit around cloud, it's because cloud is fundamentally different,” Subraminian said. “It isn't a technology, it isn't a (model) of business. It's a combination of both. It is a style of computing.”
She defined the style as “treating computing as a means to an end, as opposed to technology for technology's sake.”
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Keywords: Sun, cloud computing, data center outsourcing | | 
