At the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Dr. Kristof Kloeckner, vice president, Strategy & Enterprise Initiatives, Systems and Software, and CTO, Cloud Computing, at IBM, delivered a keynote address on current cloud computing initiatives and the future of cloud computing in the software industry.
"We all know that IT is at a kind of inflection point," said Kloeckner, pointing out that IT systems are getting "more and more complex" and probably in the range of $7 out of every $10 is spent "just keeping the engine turning over."
Driving cloud computing's appeal now is virtualization, driving up utilization and reducing capital cost, but also very importantly service automation and standardization, he said. "You can only automate if you standardize the scope of services that you deliver."
According to Kloeckner, cloud computing, in a sense continues the journey that was started with service-oriented architectures, when the industry focused on enterprise architectures, standardizing on architectural approaches, and standardizing interfaces. "And now we are driving toward standardizing delivery environments and standardizing the services themselves." However, he noted, IBM very strongly believe that many types of clouds will coexist. There will be private and public clouds, Kloeckner said, but his suspicion is that enterprise clouds will essentially be hybrid, combining elements of private deployment and deployment in shared environments.
In addition to providing a range of solutions and services for cloud computing, IBM itself is taking advantage of cloud computing for a range of use cases, said Kloeckner, including the delivery of self service analytics, as well as for development and test, and for storage of unstructured data.
Kloeckner concluded his talk by emphasizing that cloud computing is "not just hype" but in fact offers real benefits. Building on the integration of virtualization, automation, but also standardization, it is a "transformative" trend, he said, noting that clients deploying it are seeing significant results not just in cost savings but also in better business outcomes and greater speed of delivery.
To listen to Kloeckner's keynote, go here.