Over the last decade we have seen tremendous progress in corporate IT's transition to virtualization to enable resource consolidation, to reduce capital expenditures, and to towards more automated shared resource pools to deliver IT services. We have seen a tremendous rise in the service provider market, providing ease of new services on demand as customers are looking at alternative options to deliver their business services.

All this has led to the tremendous growth, interest and hype in cloud computing as the nirvana to achieve a centralized means to deliver many services to end users. We are at a crossroads in the industry where the desire and intent to leverage cloud computing is on every CIO's lips but the challenge that keeps resonating is "how do I get there from here?" and "how can I efficiently transition and scale?"

The hype and interest in the cloud has been a blessing and a curse for our customers as every vendor is proposing every possible technology as the "cloud" solution to the problem and customers get caught in the pool of technology of choices versus a vision and roadmap of how to efficiently transition traditional IT to a cloud services model.

In essence, cloud computing is automating IT services and customers want a way to deliver their business services in a flexible and scalable fashion. While today's market demand centers around private clouds and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the cornerstone of on demand and self-service infrastructures, it is just that, the start. Customers cannot get caught in the same trap as they did in the past, where they get locked into an inflexible technology based decision that limits their potential.

Enter XaaS (Anything as a Service), which fundamentally provides a vision for customers (Enterprise and MSPs) to deliver cloud services that are flexible, scalable and provide rapid time to value. The anatomy of XaaS is very simple and ingenious - deliver a common user-facing portal to deliver many services from IaaS, VDI, business services (exchange, HA/DR), etc. through a common but flexible orchestration framework. The power of the orchestration engine enables exposing a multitude of automated services and the ability to connect and integrate into a powerful provisioning engine(s). The common model needs to include the ability to track and meter consumption of services and enable IT to bill for these services on a utility basis and manage the life cycle of the service with a service catalog.

What is different and unique and what customers need to consider is a more flexible option for XaaS that allows them to easily plug and play new services very rapidly, integrate multiple infrastructure needs from physical, virtual, converged infrastructures (VCE, UCS, etc.) as well as some of the innovative grid-based infrastructures, such as CA AppLogic cloud platform, to avail of a very cost effective resource pool option. 

Customers are asking for a vision and direction to allow them to confidently embark on the cloud journey, but also have the capability to be flexible to their needs. This is exactly the focus of CA Technologies new offerings, especially CA Automation Suite for Clouds, which has been designed from the ground up for virtualization and cloud needs with a focus of a pre-integrated and extensible orchestration layer to allow customers to rapidly embark on the cloud journey. The out-of-the-box integrations and process flows enable a customer to stand up an IaaS and start building out various cloud services offerings. But that's the start, as I discussed above; the key focus we want customers to avail is the ability to use the foundational framework to rapidly deliver new automated IT Services to build the XaaS vision through a powerful orchestration layer and have the capability to easily integrate into multiple automation integration needs. This prevents the lock in and inflexibility I mentioned earlier, where customers tend to get locked into a vendor solution for their hypervisor or converged infrastructure needs versus having a flexible extensible common model to expose cloud services from multiple options.

I will leave you with the following thoughts.

• It is time to give customers more flexibility and choice and not repeat silos of technologies with silos of clouds.
• The cloud journey may start with IaaS but XaaS becomes the ultimate path that will take many turns and destinations.
• A common model to integrate and expand automated IT services across heterogeneous resources pools are the foundation for a well-designed XaaS.