Come on people! The Cloud is Infrastructure!

I'm going to go on a bit of a rant. Forgive me but I did warn you in advance.

The Cloud is not a new thing. It's an evolution of an old thing. A very old thing. The old thing is IT infrastructure. Yes, infrastructure like boring old server and software systems that you run applications on top of. How many times in the last few months have I heard people tell me "oh, you don't have any cloud experience..." Really? So let me get this correct. The fact that I've spent most of my career working on hardware and software solutions such as blade and rack optimized servers, LDAP and identity management, email and calendaring software, infrastructure for server, storage, networking and desktop virtualization to deliver solutions that solve problems for IT has nothing to do with the Cloud? The Cloud delivers off-prem, multi-tentant to run applications that solve problems for IT right? So please fill in the in that statement... My guess is that it's infrastructure.

The Cloud computing era is a fantastic sea change in the deployment models for IT infrastructure. That is a given. Outsourcing and on-demand elastic capability represents a completely different model for information technologies. However don't view the infrastructure as fundamentally different than what it is: an optimized aggregation of software and hardware delivered virtually from a datacenter somewhere to an end user somewhere else.

I've now worked as a senior executive at four virtualization infrastructure companies: VMware, Citrix, ScaleMP and Pano Logic. In all cases we delivered capabilities to virtualize and deliver services in an on-demand fashion. In all cases we enabled "cloud delivery" methodologies. In none of the cases did we view the Cloud as different from the fundamental disaggregation of services from hardware or locality.

So when did the Cloud become some sort of merit badge? The infrastructure to support the Cloud and SaaS offerings are no more than three to five years old and, in many cases is still dramatically evolving. As a point of fact then how can someone who has spent years developing the infrastructure not be seen as someone with "cloud experience?" And truly, if not someone who has been in the business of IT infrastructure not having cloud experience then who does?