Slowly but steadily the debate about private clouds is increasing. While debate can be a good thing, is this one worth having? In the long-term, will anyone care who owns a machine?

Under provocative titles like "Private cloud discredited, part 1" and "Do We Really Need Private Clouds?," the private cloud debate is building up steam. The first blog is actually called "part 1" because the author is sure there will be a part two, given the raging emotions and all the opinions being aired.  The second one is part of a very readable guest series by IT analyst Robin Bloor at Cloud Commons.

I vividly remember when we all got exited some years ago about Open Systems (with Open roughly being defined as anything running on Unix vs. anything that was not running on Unix -- including mainframes, AS/400s, HP3000s, etc. ). That debate was about as productive as the debate about private vs. public clouds may turn out to be. The most important benefit of cloud computing is that it (finally) facilitates the decoupling of the application from the underlying infrastructure. As a result, it matters a lot less where it runs (private or public). In a comment on Bloor's blog, Jonathan Davis, CTO of DNS Europe , introduces a good example of that principle. Using a cloud platform (CA 3Tera AppLogic in this case), DNS Europe enables applications to be deployed transparently and instantly over grids of compute capacity (for a discussion of grids, see this post by Bloor ) regardless of whether these clouds are private (hosted or on-premises), public or a combination (hybrid).

Getting beyond the private vs. public debate

The question we're getting most from customers is not "should we go public or private?" but rather, "where do I start with cloud computing?" Do you start with less sensitive applications on a public cloud and then expand what you learned to core apps in a private cloud, or do you start with a more sensitive app on a private cloud and expand to public when you feel that it is proven and secure enough for that application?

Surprisingly (at least to me) there was some very clear guidance given in the cloud scenario session at last month's annual Gartner Symposium/ITxpo. Basically a kind of "comply or explain" approach was suggested there. First explore whether a job can be done with a public cloud ("comply"), and only if there are valid and severe reasons to not go public ("explain") then consider private. I'm paraphrasing, so check with your analyst for exact wording and/or check out the free video recordings of this year's symposium at here .

During the symposium, Gartner also indicated that security concerns should be seen as valid but temporary challenges to be addressed and overcome, rather than as a reason (or excuse) to discard public clouds. At the recent Datacenter Summit, one of Gartner's lead analysts on cloud, Thomas Bittman, gave a slightly more nuanced view. Understandable as the folks in the room were predominantly the guys running today's private data centers. He highlighted some scenarios where private clouds make perfect sense (e.g. stable, predictable loads). He also noted that the current emphasis on IaaS (where the private versus public debate mainly plays today) over PaaS comes from the fact that IaaS can run today's existing applications and does not have to wait for a next generation of apps, as developing such new applications simply takes time.

A new generation of cloud applications

In my view this new generation of applications will be very different from the applications we run today, which makes it even more important that these new generations of applications no longer be tied to underlying infrastructures. This is a trend we've seen in the past: mainframes introduced OLTP, Mini's or distributed systems introduced departmental systems and later packaged applications like MRP and ERP, and internet web systems introduced the age of e-commerce, where we started buying books and gadgets online and doing our banking online. So I expect that "re-hosting" our existing apps to private or public clouds will be only a very small part of the long term cloud story. Not that next year won't be a very lucrative year for many vendors helping organizations move their existing applications to hosted or internal private clouds.

But the big long-term story is that cloud will be ideal for a generation of new applications. Applications that allow organizations to collaborate with other organizations -not just the much talked about in-company Twitter and Facebook clones that enable people to waste as much time at the office as they do at home. Through new collaboration applications, organizations can take business processes that were traditionally done in-house and source them as "as a service". These processes can vary from bill collecting, invoicing, physical distribution, repair handling and HR to full manufacturing or product design. Allowing companies to specialize and offer these services to many organizations will enable them to achieve massive economies of scale. Note that many of these services which will be largely or completely information/software based. 

Here's an example: Imagine the efficiencies of one company handling repairs for several large mobile phone manufacturers versus each company having to arrange repairs themselves. Most phone manufacturers sell through the same resellers, use the same repair centers, source form the same Chinese factories, etc. Hooking these up to a central platform used by multiple players can give an enormous platform effect.  An early European player in the area is eBuilder.com. These types of new generation cloud applications will render efficiencies far beyond any pure IT savings or efficiencies imaginable (see also my entry re: Gitex).

Now, you may say that companies have started this move towards specialization and outsourcing of processes already some years ago. And you're right. But so far, they have done so despite of support in IT applications. Thanks to the cloud, IT can now become the big promoter, enabler and catalyst for this.

This is an excerpt from a post that originally appeared at http://blog.gregorpetri.com/. Read the full-length version here. Follow Gregor on Twitter at @GregorPetri.