Roundtable: How to build a private cloud

The advantage of being local

Somerville: Local data storage is very important for local providers because we have a stable government, we are politically stable, we have a stable power grid, we have all the things that say if you have data in a data centre here it's pretty safe and low-risk. So there's value to that. If we're to compete against a provider who is going to host their data away that's one of the first things we use.

Illot: Yes, we certainly use that to our advantage...

Somerville: You don't want to go and fight for your data in the court of law in Singapore.

George: I was telling [a bank] about Softlayer buying The Planet [hosting companies in the US] - one of the services was you can pick which country you want your data to reside as one of the options...

CRN: How does the customer know where it resides?

George: I have no idea...

McCullum: How do you prove where it's running, how it's running, and if I want to take that back how do I do it and know it's housed here in Australia? Trust us!

Lenz: One of the big opportunities for a lot of the resellers in Australia is that most companies will go to their trusted advisor to have a conversation and that will lead into other services.

The concept that people had around the cloud, they'll go to 27 providers to get all their applications to run, maybe in the future if provisioning works. But getting back to the original point, I want one throat to choke.

McCullum: You're trying to bring it back to the Vblock conversation, aren't you? (laughter)

Lenz: I think that's a very important thing, I think that's the opportunity. With all the noise going around, at the end of the day there is an opportunity for resellers to offer services, whether they're physical or virtual, to their customers but they need to have a strategy on how they're going to handle it...

McCullum: It's interesting - we talked about the Amazons and Tata or whoever it is setting up public clouds en masse. But the more we talked about real business applications, regulatory requirements, security, data privacy, all those sorts of things, the more it brings it back down to earth and you have to look at real solutions.
Having a mass scale out commodity hardware platform built in India, is that going to service someone's business, regulatory, performance requirements?

Prosper: If there was someone out there in the market who could provide the governance, who is accessing your data, where your data resides, then that would solve that. Luckily, as a plug for Novell, we have that.

Lamas: There is a continuum of solutions and basically we are taking just point views within the continuum. There is going to be a huge combination of things and some customers are going to be outsourced, some customers are going to be a mix of both...

Lenz: The IT industry will continue to grow - that's the one thing that comes out of all this. We're one of the most over-outsourced countries in the world, and one of the most virtualised as well, and yet our industry is still growing.

CRN: Don't you think this trend towards private cloud is going to allow resellers to grow in scale, so the industry may grow but will the channel grow?

Lenz: Absolutely the channel will grow.

George: But it will increasingly be solution-centric rather than product-centric.

Somerville: Yes, but we'll become your customers, your worst nightmare! (laughter) If you think your customer base is already sophisticated, well when your customers are resellers, they're going to be even more sophisticated.

Somerville: There will be front-page news items coming in 12 to 18 months that will be about X company which hosts data goes down and its customer has no data and now they're dealing with a liquidator. Theywill become front page stories that's going to change people's view.

CRN: So the first reseller that goes under, are your customers going to look for reassurance?

Somerville: Let's hope it's not me! (laughter)

CRN: What will you say to your customer?

Illot: You cross that bridge when you come to it.

CRN: One of the things I have heard is that there's going to be more sharing of financial data; the customer will say they want access to your books at some level to see how the company is performing.

Lenz: There is no difference - the financial viability of a reseller is a conversation a customer would have today. I think this is not new. If I was a customer with a company which has just started out I would probably be having a bigger conversation with them around their business plan, their direction and all the rest of it, and I'd be taking a risk as a customer by jumping into bed with that particular account.

But if I had a long-standing relationship with Somerville I'm not going to immediately say to Craig that I want to see his books.

CRN: One last question - how are you pricing SLAs for private clouds?

Somerville: We have a sophisticated customer base and those who want it often ask for redundancy. A customer will come and investigate or put a tender out to move their services into the cloud and often that comes with a whole host of specifications - I want two data centres, one in Sydney, one in Melbourne, I want (a certain) amount of guaranteed bandwidth, I want a data centre at this rating. So often the smart customers are actually coming and saying this is what I want, tell me how much that's going to cost me.