Since the Hong Kong Design Summit, speculation about the future of the public and private cloud platform market, and specifically OpenStack, has been rampant, writes Wikibon contributor and SolidFire Director of Strategic Alliances David Cahill in “Stack Wars: Playing all year at a cloud near you“. The inevitable subject of debate is how viable OpenStack is as an alternative to market leader AWS. But this may be the wrong question. History shows that the market has room for two or three major platform players. If AWS is the Apple of the cloud market, there is still the question of what platform or platforms will be the Android and which will prove to be the Microsoft, Palm or Blackberry.

One major unsettled question is whether the same platform will dominate the public PaaS and private cloud or whether they will become separate markets with separate leaders. Another is to what extent hardware will be important in the private cloud market. Hardware innovation is still important, Cahill writes. Apple found it needed to own key parts of the hardware technology of its mobile devices to adequately guarantee the user experience. The same is likely to be true for cloud, and while Amazon, Google, IBM, and HP build their own, most other PaaS providers and companies building private clouds do not.

The Contenders

With those issues in mind, Cahill looks at several candidates as major cloud platform players. One interesting contender that is not always part of the discussion is VMware. It is trying to parlay its dominance in server virtualization into a strong position in the private cloud market. It, however, may prove to be the Microsoft of the industry. Microsoft basically could not get turned around fast enough to dominate the mobile market the way it has the desktop, and now while its technology gets strong marks and it should expand its presence in mobile over the next two years, it probably will never attain dominance.

OpenStack gets its strength from RackSpace, IBM and HP, who are betting they can use it to gain a major share of both the public and private markets. They do not want to let this market slip away from them the way the virtualization market did. IBM and HP of course have the benefit of controlling their own hardware as well. But OpenStack needs a strong, dominant leader to set its direction and drive the pace of development. So far that leader has not emerged.

Apache CloudStack has been the early challenger to AWS in cloud deployments, seemingly putting it in a strong position going into 2014. But it is ceding ground in the all-important mindshare in the market to OpenStack, making it a wildcard according to Cahill. And, like OpenStack, it lacks a strong champion to set direction.

Google and Microsoft Azure have not waited for OpenStack or CloudStack to reach maturity and instead have taken the Amazon path of developing their own proprietary solutions. However nothing prevents any of those public cloud players from packaging their software on their own or a partner’s hardware and moving into the private cloud market. AWS may already have done so. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos called the system Amazon is creating for the CIA a “private cloud” recently on 60 Minutes. And Eucalyptus is packaging AWS with hardware for the private cloud market.

Conclusions

While AWS holds the early lead, that does not guarantee long-term success, Cahill concludes. AWS could be playing the part of Blackberry. And if it does prove to be the long-term leader, the market has plenty of room for other players in both the public and private space. The line between success and failure is thin, and at this time any of several scenarios could play out over the next few years.