Skytap Takes Public Clouds Closer To The Enterprises

Skytap, the Seattle based Cloud vendor operating since 2006, made an announcement
today about a new release of their product which will help sweeten the public clouds for enterprise consumption.
They have announced some new features related to the cost control and
policy enforcement. These features have the potential to tame the Cloud
to suit the needs of the enterprise customers.

Enterprises are still skeptical of moving their entire operations to
the Cloud partly due to their concerns about security and, also, due to
the belief that the public clouds are not cost effective for steady state usage (I have my own doubts about such beliefs). Such skepticism has forced enterprises to move cautiously towards the Clouds and this has lead to the adoption of a hybrid model of Cloud Computing.
Some of the areas where enterprises are comfortable tapping into the
public clouds includes the non-critical areas like development and testing.
Skytap targets exactly this niche market.

Skytap is a
company backed by Madrona Venture Group, Ignition Partners, Bezos
Expeditions, and Washington Research Foundation Capital, with the
executive team consisting of veterans from HP, Microsoft, Mercury
Interactive, Rational Software, and EMC. Their initial offering, called
Skytap Virtual Lab Manager,
offers 100% self service provisioning of complex IT setup without any
major architectural changes. In fact, it is so flexible that it is
possible to have a virtual infrastructure in the Clouds that mimics the
enterprise datacenter architecture exactly. Skytap is based on industry
standard virtualization platforms and supports open migration to and
from the cloud with no application or architectural changes. I have
seen a demo of their Virtual Lab Manager. What struck me the most was
the ease of use and the flexibility it offers in managing the virtual
infrastructure.

With just a browser, an enterprise IT unit can tap into Skytap’s offering and build
a virtual infrastructure of any scale. It is also very easy to scale up or
down based on the demand. With their product, it is also possible to automate the
provisioning and deprovisioning of the infrastructure including setting
up and replication of multi-machine environments for development and
QA, IT ops testing, training and demo labs. Another important feature
of their Virtual Lab Manager that elicited a wow from me was the
availability of a library with exhaustive set of pre-built virtual
images, databases, applications, testing tools, etc.. I have seen
Amazon’s AMI offerings and, also, the offerings from various vendors in
the Amazon ecosystem and I haven’t come across any vendor who could
match the resources available in the Skytap library. Their wide range of resources
includes Windows client OS like XP and Vista, Windows Servers all the way from 2000
to 2008, various Linux distros, proprietary and open source
databases, servers like Sharepoint and testing tools like JMeter and
Selenium. Their exhaustive library can take care of all the
requirements of an enterprise to set up a virtual infrastructure
comparable to their own internal infrastructure. In this era of
distributed teams with various outsourcing partners in different
countries, Skytap’s virtual infrastructure makes it easy to
collaborate. The ease at which the Cloud based resources can be distributed to
different teams makes their solution a compelling one for the
enterprises.

I have been following Skytap for sometime now. I had more questions about the viability of their model. Even though their product is a virtual management application, they have their own datacenter at Tacoma, Washington. I felt that they could save more money by tapping an existing Cloud provider like Amazon or Go grid. I spoke to Ian Knox, Director of Product Management at Skytap and he told me that the current insfrastructure offerings from companies like Amazon and Go Grid are still very expensive and they could offer their solutions at a much lower cost because they have their own infrastructure. He mentioned that if the offerings of Amazon or Go Grid gets commoditized in the future, they will have no hesitation to move their platform to operate on top of these services. Another thing that bothered me about Skytap was the possibility that someone like Amazon can easily kick them out of the market by offering a feature rich dashboard similar to Skytap. He pointed out that Amazon is wedded to Xen based systems and there are many enterprises who are still relying on the VMWare VMs. These enterprise customers would want to move to Clouds without any architectural changes and they can do it easily with Skytap. This helps Skytap maintain their position in the marketplace even if Amazon decides to offer a powerful infrastructure management solution on top of their Cloud offerings. If we add the wide range of offerings in the Skytap library to this advantage, we have a winner in the name of Skytap serving a niche.

I have been talking to many folks on the enterprise side about their take on Cloud
Computing. In spite of the offerings by Skytap and many other vendors
in this space, they are still hesitant to adopt the Cloud. One of the
reasons cited by them, including a few people during the UtR event at
Mountain View recently, is the lack of availability of a chargeback
mechanism. In the absence of a way for chargeback reporting, enterprises are vary
of controlling the costs incurred by the use of Clouds by their globally
distributed teams. One of the biggest advantages of Cloud Computing is
the near instant availability of resources for consumption, without going through the lengthy process of authorization. Such
an arrangement sends jitters to CFOs who are worried about the
unpredictable costs and possible abuses that comes with such a
flexibility.

Skytap’s new version, announced today, addresses these concerns by offering a
chargeback reporting, quotas and account Management along with an
advanced role based User Access Control. This ensures that companies
can take full advantage of this new dynamic approach to computing,
while still controlling usage and avoiding the unfettered overspending. This
release has a potential to lure more and more enterprise customers to try the
public clouds with confidence. 

Image Courtesy Crunchbase.