Enterprise cloud providers must borrow from Apple’s playbook

I’ve been on the road with clients and partners of late and one thing I can attest to, other than the fact that trains are a much more civilized form of travel versus planes, is that enterprise interest in cloud greatly outpaces actual cloud investments.

The second development I can attest to is, at the highest levels of companies, there’s a realization that today’s approach to IT is suboptimal. Cloud computing is supposed to help, but C-level folks aren’t convinced. Why? Because IT is stuck in the weeds and still isn’t thinking about what users care about and how to serve users through cloud computing.

IT values infrastructure, but users value applications

Applications have value to users. All the storage, networking, compute, operating systems, hypervisors, and middleware that underpin these applications are, from a user standpoint, irrelevant. We in IT find these piece parts incredibly relevant, sometimes even sexy. Many careers in IT are spent going deep on one of these parts, and many services hours are spent integrating products from each piece part into a platform to run the application — you know, the thing the user cares about.

It pains us as IT professionals to not have control over each and every layer of the stack. We want not only control, but to tinker with each layer of the stack. Vendors provide best practices for their layer of the stack and ask us to follow these guidelines. Sometimes we do, but most times we believe our particular environment is so different than others that we need those additional five configuration tweaks. We love the control.

Giving up a little control for a lot of benefit

When it was first released, I couldn’t fathom why any self-respecting IT professional would buy an iPhone. Sure it was beautiful and easy to use, but could I install additional memory? Could I change the battery? Could I run any application I want? Simply put, would I have the same level of control over the device as I’d become accustomed to?

Some developers asked whether they had the same level of control and flexibility they were accustomed to with Web and Windows applications when building an iOS application. The answers to these questions were not ones I or other IT pros wanted to hear: I couldn’t do any of those things, and developers had to live within the confines of the iOS APIs. Yet look at how much better life is for users and iOS developers as a result of Apple saying no to the degree of control, configuration, and tinkering we’re all so accustomed to in any IT organization.

Cloud vendors still stuck in IT weeds, but for how much longer?

Try applying lessons from the iPhone to today’s cloud offerings. To date, the most successful cloud provider, Amazon.com, enables IT to remain stuck in the weeds, with virtually all of the control and complexity it’s used to. Is it any wonder that C-level folks aren’t rushing to approve a “cloud project”?

OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform, is firmly rooted in the infrastructure-as-a-service layer of the cloud computing spectrum. For all its aspirations, OpenStack doesn’t remove the complexity of piecing together storage, networking, compute resources, and hypervisors from varying vendors.

Nebula, an OpenStack-based startup I’ve previously covered, tries to simplify the IT infrastructure piece through an appliance offering. But there’s still a lot of work to provision a platform for the items your users — and your C-level managers — care about: applications.

In announcing Oracle’s public cloud offerings this week, Larry Ellison called out Salesforce.com as the “roach motel” of cloud services. Although true to a degree, what Ellison neglected to mention is the immense value that Salesforce.com is providing to developers — and ultimately users — by offering a platform for applications. Sure, the applications have to fit in the APIs supported by Salesforce.com. Indeed, I argue that the fact that Salesforce.com’s platform as a service is not standards-based, as Ellison pointed out in a roundabout fashion, should not be applied to PaaS cloud offerings in general.

Make no mistake that enterprise vendors, many of whom are bringing out enterprise cloud offerings, are going to take a page out of the Apple playbook. In fact, some already are. IBM (my employer) talks about workload-optimized systems. Oracle talks about hardware and software engineered together.

These offerings take away much of the time and challenges of building IT environments from piece parts. These environments fast-track the delivery of applications to users. Some IT departments will resist these pre-integrated products, especially in the cloud arena. After all, we IT folk like control.

But the fact that an order-of-magnitude-too-much control leads to complexity and gets in the way of providing applications to users is often an afterthought. For how much longer can we get away with that?

I should state: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

This article, “Enterprise cloud providers must borrow from Apple’s playbook,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Savio Rodrigues’s Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.