Cloud computing is still a new idea for a vast majority of IT organizations. According to a recent survey by Wikibon.org, 48% of IT practitioners in the U.S. indicate that they are just getting started with cloud computing or have no clear strategy with cloud. An additional 15% of those surveyed think cloud is “a meaningless buzzword.”

Despite the skeptics, the promise of cloud computing is that it will dramatically cut costs, simplify operations and improve organizational agility. Many CIOs are concerned that if they don’t get on the cloud curve, their organizations will fall behind and become less competitive in the market.

One major trend that SiliconANGLE has been watching is the rise of the cloud service provider (CSP). IT organizations worldwide are struggling with perpetual budget cuts and the new mantra of “do more with less.” Ironically, this dynamic is in stark contrast to the trends within the CSP space. In particular, CSPs such as Terremark, Datapipe and Switch; and upstarts like Virtustream and SoftLayer are seeing massive growth. They are investing in technology, people and processes and are innovating; delivering the new model of IT– namely that of a utility. The concept is that like an electric company, IT will be increasingly centralized and housed in giant data centers managed by skilled staff in highly secure physical environments.

Analysts and other experts agree that these CSPs are racing to operate at megascale. The stakes are high as Google, Amazon and Facebook are setting the trend and becoming poster children for cloud at scale. A key aspect of managing big clouds at scale is automation.

Indeed, Paul Maritz was recently quoted at a Gartner conference for IT execs as saying: “That’s what this whole cloud thing is about. It’s about automation at the lower levels of the stack. If you look at what’s happening in these big clouds — Google, Amazon — they don’t use management. They use automation.”

While established companies like HP, VMware, IBM and Microsoft have been heavily investing in the cloud, and often cite automation as a lynchpin, many experts are looking to startups to really change the dynamics of the game. New entrants are coming on the scene and in particular some of the hottest are those which involve flash memory storage.

One such company is SolidFire which makes an all-flash storage array. What’s unique about SolidFire according to insiders is two things: 1) the company is focusing exclusively on the CSP market and 2) it has a major emphasis on automation.  To support CSPs, experts say SolidFire is enabling cloud providers to offer new types of service level agreements. The approach taken by SolidFire is unique in that it allows CSPs to guarantee quality of service (QoS). Experts say this means CSPs can begin to offer new types of applications including high performance mission critical systems such as ERP and big data analytics.

In a Wikibon.org blog, seasoned analyst David Floyer argues that 100% automation of operational processes is a fundamental prerequisite for large clouds. He singled out SolidFire and its use of open APIs to control QoS metrics (e.g. IOPs, bandwidth and latency) saying, “… SolidFire have designed for deployment in a multi-tenant environment. This API approach allows for the automation of all tasks associated with deployment, provisioning, monitoring, and reporting within a storage environment. In turn, it is much easier to integrate storage management into cloud management suites.”

Alex Williams on ServicesANGLE recently cited SolidFire as one of ten hot startups to watch. Here’s what he wrote:

“The company calls itself a truly higher performance storage option for cloud service providers. Its founder, Dave Wright, is one of these people whose pedigree reminds us of past titans. He dropped out of Stanford in 1998 to help start GameSpy Industries. He and his team built a back-end architecture that powered thousands of games and millions of users. After selling the company to News Corp., he started Jungle Disk, one of the earliest leaders in the cloud-based storage world. He sold Jungle Disk to Rackspace in 2008. In December 2009 Wright left Rackspace to start SolidFire.”

SolidFire has gone from unknown to hot new startup in no time. In June, David Wright’s company launched a high-performance all-flash storage system targeted exclusively at the CSP marketplace.  According to the company, this appliance enables a radical decrease to a service provider’s storage footprint while simultaneously improving performance and speed. Wright was named as one of the top 10 executives at the recent VMWorld conference.

According to sources, SolidFire was also one of the few flash companies participating at the recent OpenStack Conference held in Boston on October 5-7.  SolidFire was one of the exhibitors and is reportedly angling to become a more active participant in the OpenStack community. OpenStack, a cloud initiative formed by Rackspace and NASA,  could benefit from the contributions of a company like SolidFire which provides so-called block-based storage solutions to the market. Block storage arrays are common in higher performance transaction systems. Swift, OpenStack’s object store is similar to Amazon’s S3 but to date, according to sources, OpenStack lacks a block storage alternative to Amazon’s Elastic Block Store (EBS). By contributing block storage expertise to the OpenStack movement, SolidFire is betting that OpenStack becomes one of the predominant cloud standards which could confer advantage to the company.

SolidFire’s aggressive and innovative style in utilizing flash memory and automation, targeted at CSPs as the core of their business, could also be their ticket to becoming another startup success story. The company likely hopes to follow the growth trajectory of another flash player, Fusion-io. While SolidFire plays in much different markets than Fusion, with the flash craze they could be headed for an IPO.