The State of Confusion for Cloud Management Tools
What does Dell’s May 2013 purchase of Enstratius—with a rename from EnStratus due to potential trademark conflicts—mean for the cloud management tools market? Does the purchase of BMC Software by a consortium of the private equity firms Bain Capital, Golden Gate Capital, GIC Special Investments, and Insight Venture Partners for $46.25 per share or approximately $6.9 billion in cash on the same date signal that the market is finally taking cloud management and orchestration tools seriously?
According to Dave Bartoletti, an analyst at Forrester, this means the tools are finally market ready, and the industry consolidation cycle that started with last year’s purchase of Quest Foglight by Microsoft and VMware’s acquisition of DynamicOps has commenced.
However, from the confusing marketing messages from other companies in the cloud management and orchestration tools niche, such as Scalr, RightScale, Flexiant, and Cohesiveft, it looks more like the market is still a free-for-all without a clear definition of what the products are or where the technology is headed.
There is no doubt that tools to manage the deployment of applications and workloads within a cloud are increasingly seen as a much-needed addition to any company’s cloud administration toolkit. For any company that has public and private cloud-based workloads, tools to manage the resulting application sprawl nightmare are essential. What constitutes these tools is more of an open question.
Cloud management tools come in a confusing array of flavors and support functions, ranging from single point solutions to enterprise grade and priced comprehensive toolkits. To add to the complexity, some tools work from the applications layer and extend down, such as AppsFirst and Cliqr; others start at the infrastructure layer and work up. Other wrinkles are tools that work across diverse platforms or others that are exclusive to a single platform such as AWS or VMware.
Workload orchestration tools, such as Enstratius, RightScale, and Kaavo, allow users to move workloads across diverse clouds. Cloud brokering products, such as RightScale and Gravitant, deploy workloads based on price and suitability with the aim of optimizing costs.
On the other hand, image management software, such as PuppetLabs and OpsCode, is designed to reduce the management headaches of building and managing virtual machine images. Cloud optimization analytics tools, such as CloudCheckr, Cloudability, and Newvem, are an exciting new category to keep an eye on.
What is the average cloud systems administrator who just wants to use some tools to make his job easier to do? Are these tools really mature enough to support the complex needs of an enterprise with hundreds or thousands of applications and a hybrid cloud architecture?
The best tool on the market today is ServiceMesh. But with its current focus on creating a comprehensive full featured platform, they have, for the most part, priced themselves out of the market for all except the largest, most sophisticated buyers.
The market is still clearly in too much of a state of flux, which leaves users searching for simple tools but opens the way for large vendors and integrators to jump in. As the tools and market mature in the next few years, expect to see crisper definitions and functional convergence.
