NewScale, a company that develops cloud services solutions, just last week announced record financial and customer results.  This week, NewScale is announcing the release of newScale 9, which enables IT organizations to provide to their customers a self-service ordering and lifecycle management for both desktop and data center services, across cloud, virtual and physical compute environments.  Company is doing well in many verticals.

I spoke with NewScale’s CEO, Scott Hammond and Founder and CTO, Rodrigo Flores.  I really like these guys.  I’ve met Rodrigo when SiliconAngle put together our CloudComputing Club open social group – our first event was the SFCloudClub in San Francisco.  I’m impressed with Rodrigo’s company.  Scott Hammond, Rodrigo’s CEO and partner at NewScale, is a very solid and experienced executive.  NewScale has been in business for eight years and they have an interesting “angle” on cloud and IT.

What impresses me about NewScale is their length of time in business, business strategy, positioning, and industry partnerships.  They are positioned to grow with all this chaotic demand for cloud computing.  There is a new grass roots counter culture developing within the infrastructure segments and this organic growth is impacting IT.   New disruptive trends like cloud computing and re-architecting datacenters are changing the lifecycle management issues required to operate IT at scale within large enterprises.

Simply put NewScale allows for companies to go out and get into cloud and yet handle the bureaucratic corporate requirements around planning and compliance.

NewScale’s Big Picture

There is a lot going on in IT and with the consumers of IT.  Disruptive forces within the datacenter has revolved around the massive commodization of technology specifically the big strides in virtualization and now external cloud computing.

All these changes creates a big problem for IT- shortage of expertise.  Match that up with changes on the demand side – IT has a more important role in the enterprise.  IT needs to deliver services that deliver value to the enterprise.  In today’s economy, there is pressure on IT in terms of cost, business value, and responsiveness to deliver value.

According to NewScale’s Scott Hammond “the employer of IT (the business) is in a state of constant dissatisfaction.  Over the past few years the web exploded and the web experience have spilled over to employees who bring those web expectations to the workplace.  The employees expect everything “webified” and on demand.  This is the mass consumerization of IT.”

Newscale sits between the disruption within IT within the consumer experience demand *and* the pressure for IT to deliver value and agility.  One of the biggest challenges in cloud computing that NewScale solves is the issue of how do you take enterprise IT and put it into a web 2.0 experience and self service model across all the service within the enterprise.  Areas like the desktop, datacenter, physical to virtual to cloud and how does that roll up into a set of services for IT.

New IT Use Case – Enterprise Employees are Consumers NOT Users

The vision of NewScale is all about the “consumerization” and “commoditization” of IT.  It’s a relevant model today.  For example, IT is dealing with massive commoditization of components that are being “mashed up” into a set of services more often then not.

Simply put the enterprise is seeing “mashups” as the norm not the exception.  Ultimately the user within an enterprise demands consumer like services and experiences.  This is the new IT model.

We are moving from users to consumers within the enterprise.  What NewScale is doing is providing a platform to enable this.

Datacenter Cloud Investments Impact on IT

Investment in the datacenter and cloud has been in consolidating the datacenter, putting out the virtualization technology, providing some low level automation for ongoing processes for support and monitoring.  Now enterprises are looking to take investment and make IT represented more as a set of services in that new datacenter cloud model.

The changes in the datacenter and cloud creates change and is often in conflict with IT practices which require control and governance.  NewScale is a nice solution for enterprises who are making investments in cloud and want to map the controls of IT without handcuffing the cloud execution and benefits.   For example, the folks working in datacenters and in clouds are doing cool cutting edge work.  These folks are the pioneers in the organization with respect to cloud and these new datacenter models.  However, these folks are often considered “rogue” to their IT teams and exeuctives. This is a culture problem within enterprises.

NewScale has a solution for bridging the new “wild west” growth in new datacenter and cloud models while allowing IT to be involved on their terms.  Cloud is fast and IT is slow especially around policies, control, process, workflow, .etc.

At the end of the day services and consumer apps is fast becoming the new standard.  Automating services for IT is big deal.

What Does This All Mean – Lets Look At History – Dell and HP Changed IT?

Big changes in IT often happen in cycles.  We are seeing that today with cloud.  For instance (pun intended), massive disruption with external cloud providers – infrastructure as a service.  This *will* change IT.  Lets look at a similar cycle five years ago.

Five years ago we saw massive disruption around the desktop and workplace services – like going to Dell and HP and getting a build to order PC bundled with software delivered overnight.  Yet it still took IT a few weeks to roll that physical equipment out.  So innovation in supply chains and workflow forced IT to change – and they did.  They had to the business cost and value benefits forced it.  That was a good thing.

We are seeing a similar trend here now with External Cloud Providers like Rackspace.   Like Dell and HP which forced IT to be faster in the enterprise workplace now with Rackspace and Amazon now you can turn on a Linux server in 5 minutes compared to taking 3-4 months in most enterprise IT shops.  How can enterprises get the same response in speed?

The forces from Rackspace and Amazon is forcing IT to change and for the better.

What will happen going forward is that enterprise will have to match the speed of Rackspace and Amazon on the IT ordering, deployment, delivery, and management.  Like Dell and HP new external cloud providers are changing the processes and workflows inside enterprise IT.  It’s crazy but a very important trend.

NewScale has the solution for enterprise to be adaptive and agile.  We’ll be following NewScale especially around the compliance and operational issues for the new datacenter and cloud computing infrastructure.

Related posts:  DataCenterKnowledge (a great blog in the segment) has a good angle on the NewScale announcement around the catalog area.