SiliconANGLE.com live blogged The Future of Cloud panel featuring Michael Skok, North Bridge Venture Partners, Dries Buytaert, CTO, Acquia, John Dillon, Engine Yard, CEO, Martin Mickos, Eucalyptus, CEO, and Lew Moorman, CSO and President Rackspace Cloud, Rackspace.

Here are the notes from the panel.  For continuous coverage on all the cloud angles go to SiliconANGLE.com.  We have a deeper opinion but for now here are the notes with commentary from the panel.

Notes

• Survey sponsored by 451 and GigaOM along with North Bridge, panel was review of the results
• Cloud usage today?

o    40% experimenting, 26% waiting to mature, 11% usage for spikes, 13% complete confidence for mission critical apps, 10% will never use, too risky

§  Panel comments

• Acquia has lot of large enterprises and gov’t agencies running mission critical sites on stack, it feels like people are ready
• Web-based co’s innovating on the edge, have a lot of adoption in fortune 500 accounts, apps are in long IT tail, mostly Greenfield, not ripping out SAP
• Eucalyptus customers have web and mobile apps that are mission critical, all run web ops on Eucalyptus, critically dependent on them, getting website running at high performance and low latency is critical

o    Survey says ppl on avg have been using cloud for 20 months, still very early

• Drivers for cloud adoption

o    #1 is agility, #2 scalability, #3 cost, #4 efficiency (well below first 3)

§  IT departments can’t respond to business requests w/o cloud

§  Acquia hosted continental/united website to announce merger, had to handle 3m pageviews/hour, couldn’t make it work on internal platform

• What are cloud drivers in 5 years time?

o    Innovation looks to be #1 new driver, agility, competitive advantage and mobility

§  Retailer running back to school site on engineyard, IT can’t respond b/c caught up with existing systems, cloud driving end-user driven IT, seeing it everywhere

• Inhibitors to cloud adoption

o    Security…same issue we saw w/internet, not worth discussing

o    Interoperability…diametrically opposed to #3 inhibitor

o    Vendor lock-in

§  Plenty of standard that don’t create lock-in, driven by open source, not just the APIs but the actual cloud and tech behind it

o    Compliance

• What is strategy of cloud today?

o    24% private, 39% hybrid, 37% public

o    Overwhelming majority of public/private cloud customers today expect to move to a hybrid model…close to 69% surveyed

§  Eucalyptus

• have identified 12-15 ways to go hybrid model, so many combinations, cloud bursting is most easily understood but not necessarily the most common

§  Rackspace

• Hard to believe that 70% of co’s will own datacenters in future, think this is sunk cost thinking

§  Engine Yard

• Think will see hybrid cloud, established vendors have vested interested in running on premise
• Private cloud doesn’t add value, all value is in the last mile, need to abstract complexity to allow concentration on the areas of innovation
• As workload settles down there will be need to tune technology specific to those environments, this favors options to have public and private clouds housed under same provider
• Cloud computing TCO

o    29% voted same as traditional computing

o    57% think lower

o    Manageability…39% less complex, 39% more complex

o    Hiring impact of cloud

§  42% no impact

§  32% expect increase

§  Acquia seeing a large IT teams cutting entire web team as they offload all Drupal sites to cloud providers

§  Kind of work inside IT shops will change

• When stuff becomes freely available people will use it more…this increases demand for more people
• Top cloud companies

o    Public = AWS, Google, Rackspace, Microsoft, VMware

o    Private = Acquia, Cloudera, Assistly, Nasuni, Eucalyptus

• Cloud Investments (Source: Dow Jones)

o    2009 $482m, 64 deals

o    2010 $713m, 93 deals

o    Lot of whitespace there, although definitely some funding pollution

o    North Bridge…definitely a boom in funding going on,  but will be a bust, too many fast follower investments being made, following bust will be enormous buildout

o    Just can’t have 3 companies in every category

• What new cloud services are needed?

o    Analytics

o    Monitoring

o    Management

o    Backup and archiving

o    Automation

• Risks to cloud projections

o    Vendors biggest impediment is not tech, it is human beings