Jean Staten Healy, head of cross-IBM Linux strategy, recently joined Josh Dorfman, director of alliance marketing at Novell, and host Matthew T. Grant for a new cloudchasers show focused on open source and the cloud. The cloud segment of the IT market will continue to grow rapidly over the next several years, a trend fueled by business pressures resulting from the current economic situation as well as increased pressure to accelerate the speed of innovation and provide higher levels of service at lower cost. "Our clients are really seeing there is value they can get from the cloud," stated Healy. Recent IBM client surveys confirm these concerns, she said, pointing out that more than three quarters of the clients who have been surveyed list cost pressures as the top factor in their interest in cloud solutions. This was followed by the desire to improve time to value, and also to improve reliability and availability.
As a first trial run in the cloud, customers tend to be most interested in deploying development and test workloads in the cloud, said Healy. Agreeing on that observation, Dorfman cited industry statistics that 50% of an average IT organization within a large enterprise is dedicated to test and development but that environment is idle 90% of the time. But it is not just about cost effectiveness, emphasized Healy. "The cloud also enables innovation in a number of ways and development and test is a great opportunity."
Both open standards and open source software will play important roles in cloud computing. And, cloud computing presents opportunities for the open source community as well, she noted. "Open source has gone through various evolutions over the last 10 years. It started out at the edge of the data center, it became core to the data center, and now it is really managing new generation workloads and utility computing, it is in the cloud," Healy said. "I would expect that the Linux community would continue to push the envelope here."
To listen to the cloudchasers broadcast, go here.