To many people concerned with `mission critical’ systems, cloud computing is of only passing interest, not least because it is still not considered suitable or industrial strength for the job. But if you interpret `mission critical system’ as the existence of the whole business, rather than any specific applications that might help the business to survive, then the cloud has a great deal to teach.

 Perhaps its greatest lesson is how to exploit Collective Capitalism. As cloud services are increasingly complex and powerful amalgams of different applications, services, components and tools that, only together, can create a workable, flexible and agile service solution to a business problem, so all businesses – including both `traditional’ IT vendors and their customers –  are butting up against the requirement to become the same.

 As a long-time observer of the IT industry I have become aware of a core piece of psychological dogma amongst many of its major players – the fundamental belief that their application (and in some obvious cases their hardware platform as well) is the critical component which keeps the mission of the business afloat. In most cases, of course, it no doubt played a significant part in keeping the admin of the business running – and in some cases only when the business bent its admin processes to fit what the application could provide – but those days are now fast disappearing.

 So what constitutes `mission critical’ has to become the subject of some debate. I do feel that those vendors that continue to insist that their product is at the core of mission criticality – even in the cloud – are reaching the point of doing their existing users and future customers no favours at all. For a start they are putting the cart (their `solution’) before the horse (what the user actually needs to achieve to maintain the business in good health in an often rapidly changing marketplace).

 Cloud service providers are already well aware that they exist in a `Scrabble’ world, where having the right letter to make a word marks the difference between success and failure. It is a world where two men and a dog skilled at `X’ can play a small but vital role in creating `an extremely wonderful solution’. They can be as mission critical as the biggest applications in the world.

 And the important point is that the collective approach will not just be what makes the cloud work, it will be the way that user businesses will start looking at their business solutions. They may not see it consciously that way, but they will be looking for services that start and end where they understand the process starts and ends for their business, producing the results they want, in form they want, in the timescale they need and at a cost that makes sense.

They won’t be looking for a `database’ or an `ERP system’, and it won’t come from just one supplier – though in the cloud it might just come from one service aggregator with the right brand name.

I was at a Verizon event not so long ago – the company was marking the official opening of a brand new cloud services datacentre for its recent acquisition, Terremark. During a short panel discussion/Q&A session a Verizon exec, Christopher Kimm, made a small observation that is, I feel, of some importance, particularly as he is the company’s VP of Network Field Operations for EMEA and Asia-Pac territories.

“Companies selling technology to business will be in trouble. Selling what the technology does in business value terms is now what is important. And a growing number of users now don’t buy applications as individual pieces. That is now the most expensive option because of the integration costs. The smart ones let other people do that.”

This seems important to me, and not just because it was said by an avowed technologist. To me it sums up exactly the disconnect that is starting to grow between the technology vendors – and especially the large and established ones dedicated to the many mantras of technology – and what users are increasingly now seeking……service.

As the Group President of  Terremark Worldwide, Kerry Bailey, observed, the word cloud has become a meaningless marketing term that in practice no longer says anything of any value. He now refers to the `new IT delivery model’(no doubt with the option that the word `new’ gets dropped in fairly short order).

What is delivered, of course, is a service, and what constitutes that service is entirely at the discretion of the users, and is geared entirely to the needs of their business and how they perceive those needs should be met. Looked at from that end of the telescope, the technology is decidedly secondary.

The new IT delivery model therefore decouples delivered services from the technology stacks on which they run. Yes, the technology is still necessary, but these days a service can be constructed from several different applications and tools, it may well run on different technology stacks, so technology `mix and match’ is now the order of the day. Technology in its own right is no longer the God of Gods.

The trouble is, however, that many of the established technology players, particularly in the software sector, seem unable to cope with being the new bit-part players the cloud now makes them, rather than centre stage idols. It has become a little pastime of mine to track their collective attitude to the cloud, an attitude always driven by their collective fear of losing their hold on customers.

They started by saying that while the cloud was OK for `novelties’ like Google searching, it was of no value to real business (and the customers should stick with us). Next it was acceptance that the cloud was not going away and had a role to play in business, but adding the huge caveat that it was all fearsomely complicated for businesses to understand, so it would be best if they let the technology companies handle it for them (and keep giving them the money).

Things have got a bit more complicated now, because the new IT delivery model is starting to gain real traction, even amongst the not-very-early-at-all adopters. It is even starting to sub-divide as marketing suits try different ways of selling the concepts behind it.

There are, for example, private and public clouds, which for most users are actually just different management strategies applied to the same infrastructure. Then along comes the hybrid cloud.

Now, I notice, a growing number of the established IT vendors are starting to promote `hybrid cloud’ as an identifiable, differentiated product category. So, is it?

The short answer is no, it is just an alternative management approach for using the same infrastructure. By and large they are trying the same old marketing model of trying to sell hot air based on the importance of the technology. The hybrid cloud is just an operational concept – building a service, or range of services where some elements are considered better delivered via a private `cloud’ service while other elements are run on – or sourced from – one or more public services that are available to all.

And just to confuse things, the private services can be running on anything from a public cloud service provider such as Google, Amazon or Microsoft, through to an on-premise legacy application that has been adapted to integrate with a cloud environment.

So, while some of the traditional vendors are now seeking to persuade users that it is sensible to ask for `4-tons of hybrid cloud, please’ it does not exist as a definable, measureable, packaged entity. One day, one hopes, the traditional vendors will get their collective heads round what the new IT delivery model is actually all about. Whether they can cope with the fact that it is not about technology is, of course, as yet unanswered.

I wrote a piece last week in Business Cloud 9 (http://www.businesscloud9.com/content/ibm-and-collective-capitalism/5770) about IBM, cloud-delivered services, and collective capitalism. It raises, I feel, an important sense of direction in the way service vendors need to configure themselves if they are to meet users’ needs.

And half the problem here is that very phrase, `users’ needs’. I remain convinced that are large number of the traditional vendors of IT and services feel that their established business model – they come up with new gizmos, and new packaging for old gizmos, and the users will try to work out how to get the best they can out of it – can continue to work in the cloud. But the users’ now need something very different.

Indeed, it is fair to say that the majority of users don’t yet realise quite what it means for them to be operating in a service- delivery model. For example, even the now old adage about utility computing – it will mean having data and processing on tap just like mains electricity – in fact misses the point. What do the end users really want? They don’t actually want electricity on tap. They want, for example, entertainment, clean clothes, or hot food.

In each case, reliable electricity supply is the essential underpinning (and OK, with food especially it can equally be gas, but walk with me through the analogy). But the service they require  is not even the TV, or the washing machine, or the oven; it is the ability to get from point A – bored stiff, in dirty clothes and eating a bit of cold lettuce – to point B where they are eating a properly cooked steak, while wearing a clean shirt and watching their favourite film.

This is also an excellent example of why services – in their broadest sense – are also driven by the need for collective capitalism. And this is true even when the members of the collective don’t even know that they are members. This little scenario of a user `service’ (let’s call it `A Good Evening In’) involves not just the provision of electricity but also the manufacture of a TV and broadcast medium, a farmer growing beef cattle and a good butcher, the manufacture of a washing machine (plus the essential washing powder…..oh, and a water supply system as well), several clothing manufacturers, and the producers of excellent cinematic entertainment.

That, you might say, is all blindingly obvious. But now map it onto the way that the majority of the IT vendors go about their business. “We make the best electricity you can buy” is still the extent of vision for the majority of them. What you do with it, is entirely down to you.

So the IBM example of collective capitalism is a rather neat example of a vendor discovering just what is being sold, and a bunch of users discovering what constitutes the actual service they require.

The scenario is fairly straight forward. There is a large construction project, larger and more complex than any one civil engineering company can take on. A consortium of companies comes together to combine their expertise and resources.

So far, so straight forward.

But consortia like this always sink into a morass of political in-fighting over the essential management infrastructures, such as which company gets to host the IT resources, how much the others pay for this privilege, how do they engineer the necessary integration between different IT infrastructures and, probably most difficult, which company owns the data and IP afterwards.

Here the cloud has an obvious advantage. It can be such a clear patch of `neutral’ territory where all of them can pitch camp equally; where the resources can be specified in response to project requirements rather than the resources the lead partner has available can devote to it, and costs can be shared. Data can be stored neutrally and, if necessary, completely destroyed at the end of a project. Also, any arguments about IP ownership could be resolved by having an audit trail of which company uploaded what to the common pool.

And that last element gives a hint of where this then heads. The `service’ required obviously starts to involve more than just the provision of IT flexible, scalable resources. What then if the service provider, which is itself an amalgam of individual tools, utilities and applications from a broad spread of vendors (as well as its own resources and contributions) has the expertise to predict and provision the `Rumsfeld’ services – the ones the users don’t yet know they should know they need.

IBM, like several others, does have an important component in the cloud mix here: an extensive experience in running large, complex projects. From this can be drawn expertise that can be packaged up and offered as services to those businesses that don’t know they need them.

And to extend the Rumsfeld model to the full, it can also be of great benefit where smaller, less experienced businesses don’t know that they don’t know this stuff and are consequently scared of getting into partnerships with the big players for fear of being stripped of their IP etc.

Yet users are going to need the right mix of services, from a wide range of different providers, available to them as a unified collective, which then has the entirely honourable aim of turning an honest penny or two from the transaction. From that the users can then build their own collectives to deliver to their customers the projects or services they have contracted for.

In a world of increasing collective capitalism, therefore, cloud infrastructures can provide the neutral territory where the partners in the collective can operate clearly and openly, with scalable resources and good cost management on tap. But they will also need access to the resources of expertise and tools that help them through the `Rumsfeld Quagmire’, getting permanently sucked down into solving operational and management questions they didn’t know they didn’t know, and probably won’t learn to understand without a good deal of pain.

Cloud is not new technology, just re-packaged old technology – that’s why it is commodity, because it works and does a good job. That is why the `package’ is the important bit – it is about what constitutes a service, and the way it is both delivered to end users and how they perceive it and consume it.

So the most important development for this year has little or nothing to do with what any IT industry watcher would consider remotely sexy. It is about making the cloud practical.

But then again, the cloud has very little of great technological excitement  – even Apple’s iCloud is in essence a reworking of what has gone before, usually labelled `Google’, but with the increasingly iconic `i’ branding. All the important elements of the cloud depend upon one thing, the use of technology standards, which is the biggest stumbling block to the IT industry’s most favoured mantra – innovation and change (often, it has to be said, primarily for the benefit of the on-going revenue stream).

But it is the standardisation and commoditisation of the technology which has allowed the cloud to emerge and offer users the greatest service – the emergence of an ever greater diversity and granularity of service offerings to suit their business requirements and budgets.

Most user businesses understand where they currently stand in terms of their knowledge and experience in using IT. Most now understand the messages associated with the cloud and how wonderful it can all be. Nearly all of them, however, still have no great idea, and often considerable trepidation, about the process of transition. There are no convenient chrysalis stages into which they can pop, emerging over a weekend break as a fully formed cloud-based business.

So a growing number of vendors are at last cottoning on to the fact that they need to take users through some steps in order to help business users transform themselves. They need to find tools that help them build some of the underlying infrastructure needed without too much thought. And they need to find some service demonstrations, or find areas of commonality with which they are already familiar, to help illuminate that road to understanding where they suddenly utter the fateful words – `ahh, I get it’.

That has to be one of the underlying reasons why IBM is launching a cloud-based Disaster Recovery service at Cloud Computing World Forum forum this week.

DR? isn’t that old stuff? Yes, and it’s not even new as a cloud service. But that does not take away from the fact it is an excellent demonstration of cloud capabilities. DR is traditionally difficult, time-consuming and expensive, which is why many businesses still don’t do it. Putting it out into the cloud as a service makes it much easier to work with and, dammit, attaching it to the `IBM’ brand probably still sounds more reassuring than `Arnold Scroggins Cloud Services’ to the average enterprise.

What is far more important to IBM, of course, is the fact that it has a far richer, deeper and more comprehensive package of services it can offer once a user business has sniffed success with one, albeit silo’d, project.

It is why Microsoft is increasingly attaching its cloud-based CRM and ERP services to its tried tested (and yes, often cursed) Windows user interface. Just about everyone knows how that works, so if it can be used to build and run an ERP system for a reasonably-sized business, the scary old problem of implementing an ERP system (how many noughts after the `1’ would sir like to spend?) just may become another legend of the `old days’.

It even raises the outlandish suggestion that I might understand how to set one up without the aid of complex brain surgery.

It is also why tools that can short circuit setting up cloud services, pushing most of it into the background, are becoming more important. Most enterprises want to end up with a hybrid environment – a mix of public and private cloud services, plus (in most cases) some old, critical applications still run on-premise.

Latency issues are a common cause of the continued need for on-premise services, and they are going to be a major consideration for many users well into the future – unless someone, somewhere does something clever with the laws of physics. There are tools emerging that help reduce latency, such as the new one-box optimisation solution from Blue Coat Systems, but sadly, they can’t make it go away.

But on a wider front it is tools such as those from OnApp – currently targeted at helping the traditional outsource/hosting services providers move into the cloud – which can play an important part here. They are also ideally suited to the need of enterprises – and more specifically the big vendors and service providers that are looked to by enterprises to help and guide them across the divide between the on-premise of today and the cloud of tomorrow. Those enterprises nearly all want to start their cloud transition in a small and controlled manner, building private clouds at first and then, as experience grows, starting to dabble with integrating public services as part of a growing service mix. But they always face the vexed question: `how on earth di I set that up?’ So a packaged toolset could be just what is required.

The switch to a service culture is also changing some fundamentals that are important to building practical clouds. Take security as an example. There is a switch from just defence mechanisms to a more subtle use of complex policy management and monitoring services to identify unauthorised activities. But even that may not be enough.

I did notice that the recent CIA Denial of Service attack prompted at least one company in the monitoring business to suggest it could have spotted the transgression in real time.  My knee jerk response is `good, but not great’.

Stopping such events as they start to happen – traffic management on steroids if you like – is now an important part of every cloud service. And that has to include not just stopping a particular, malicious event but also allowing all the other positive business activities to continue. Something like NetPrecept’s cPEP technology lays claim to just such a capability. It can, for example, filter traffic so that a business can set differing priority access levels to different types of customer or partner – Gold, Silver and Bronze for example. And as part of that capability can also spot, and filter out, a DoS attack while leaving the good stuff to keep flowing. The service level to customers might slow a bit, but it won’t lay down and die.

Not the greatest level of excitement to be had amongst this lot, it is true. But it does represent the real world for business users a great deal more than the latest gizmos from the fevered brains of technologists. And if the cloud is really going to take off, this has to be the year of boring and sensible.