“In all the ambiguity of what adds value to the Cloud or what facilitates the Cloud, Gravitant sits at the intersection of both, which makes it a pure Cloud company with all the experience, expertise, and solutions built around the Cloud.”

Recently, I’ve been writing mostly about what we’ve been developing for and around the Cloud at Gravitant. Now I’d like to elaborate a little bit about what’s being said and done about the Cloud outside of Gravitant. Rather than analyzing specific articles, I want to present my overall impression of what is out there and where Gravitant stands in this picture.

Due to the increasing hype surrounding the Cloud, its effects of determining the next generation of IT and what the Internet constitutes of, Cloud is getting a whole lot of attention from the actors of the sector and beyond. Initially, Cloud was defined with a bottom-to-top approach. Now, however, the new actors of the Cloud are redefining the Cloud with a top-to-bottom view.

The concept of IT resource sharing can be dated back as far as the use of mainframes, the Internet, VMware, or EC2 – depending on your perception. However, the name “Cloud” -which is cleverly set by the way- comes definitely after commoditization of IT resources, which is very recent. Before Cloud became “the Cloud”, standards of traditional IT had given direction to all innovative efforts towards Cloud. These efforts have been very technical and mostly motivated by infrastructure oriented improvements. Later on, the commoditization of IT resources has required the business model to be well defined. Although there are a lot of technical and infrastructural advancements noted, most of the focus is probably in defining the business of the Cloud.

After reading many blog articles, white papers, research papers and web content produced by a plethora of cloud companies, one thing common amongst all these articles is the lack of clarity as to what exactly can be labeled as Cloud. I meet the same kind of confusion among my colleagues as an Analytics professional as well. In general, boundaries in the field of Analytics are not very clear. It makes sense in both cases because business definitions are still in progress. However, certain examples could draw a more indicative line of what could be called as a pure Cloud effort.

Most of the work branded as Cloud efforts are actually the conversion of existing desktop software to SaaS. If you search keywords such as “Cloud” and “Analytics”, the results will show you many analytics tools as SaaS. Although I believe every type of Cloud effort is a brick in the wall while constructing a whole Cloud environment, Cloud efforts should be distinguished by what is made “for” cloud and what is made by “facilitating” Cloud. For example, if you convert management software to a SaaS application, then you are “facilitating” Cloud. If this management software is used to manage your Cloud resources, then this is an effort made “for” Cloud. Although there is a considerable gray area in the intersection of the both, I hope this example highlights a clear but subtle distinction.

So where does Gravitant stand? First of all, Gravitant is an established Cloud brokerage company listed on Gartner’s recent report on Cloud brokerage companies. According to NIST a cloud broker is “…an entity that manages the use, performance and delivery of cloud services and negotiates relationships between cloud providers and cloud consumers.” Gravitant’s cloudMatrix and cloudWiz tools manage all traditional IT resources and Cloud resources end-to-end from sourcing to provisioning and even monitoring. These tools include powerful and intelligent capacity planning, advanced monitoring and analytics tools which enable enterprises to strategically and tactically plan the capacity of their IT resources on the Cloud and in-house. In addition, these tools help enterprises efficiently analyze large amounts of data to propose the most effective Cloud Analytics solution. All these efforts make Cloud a more manageable and less costly environment to meet the IT needs of enterprises.

Furthermore, Gravitant’s major Cloud brokerage and management tools cloudMatrix and cloudWiz are user friendly, fast and smart SaaS applications. They naturally run on the Cloud efficiently, reliably and securely. In fact, Gravitant runs all of its other applications and internal IT resources on the Cloud. As such, Gravitant not only facilitates the Cloud but also has first-hand experience as a Cloud user.

All these Cloud centric activities make Gravitant a true Cloud company. Gravitant’s Cloud network grows very fast day by day and we’re proud of our growing partnerships with companies including Amazon, Terremark, Savvis, Rackspace, GoGrid and IBM. There really is a lot to learn about Gravitant’s cloud experience. If you have any ideas, thoughts or questions to add to this discussion of what is “for” cloud and what is “facilitating” cloud, please respond to this post or contact us so that we can share the intellectual part of the Cloud experience together.