Cloudera = Cloud Computing what Red Hat = Linux?

I am preparing for my keynote speech at the Cloud Camp and I noticed something that suddenly every discussion is beginning to involve is, you guessed it: Da Credit Crisis! Many conferences are getting rather poor attendence, firms are really panicking and losing focus. So I am going to avoid using Credit talk in my session as most of the guys out there will be my peers from Microsoft, Amazon, VMware, Flexiscale, Q-layer ...All Cloud brothers :-)

So Krisha got carried away as well with the CC talk, Credit Crisis, I mean :-).

Cloudera is planning to do for Cloud Computing what Redhat did for Linux more than a decade back. Redhat took the Open Source Linux operating system, repackaged it and offered it along with paid technical support. They were essentially making money out of a free software (as in beer) by using what was a new and innovative business model at that time. Enterprises were skeptical about Linux till then and Redhat’s model helped in a faster adoption of Linux by the enterprises. Enterprise adoption of Cloud Computing is in the same situation where Linux was more than a decade ago.

In today’s economy, with a possibility of recession in sight, enterprises can benefit a lot by using cloud computing. But concerns like security, privacy and regulatory issues are still keeping the enterprises from making the jump. However, enterprises can scale and operate efficiently using cloud like architecture within their own datacenters. Such a move will also cut down the costs and help enterprises save money in this downward spiraling economy. Using an open source platform like Hadoop, enterprises can tap commodity hardware to achieve a scale like Google or Yahoo for their data processing needs. The biggest reason for the reluctance of enterprises to use Open Source software like Hadoop is the lack of technical support. I think Cloudera is planning to fill this gap. From a cloud computing evangelist perspective, this is a good thing to happen. Even if the enterprises don’t move their data into the clouds immediately, they can still achieve cloud like scale, reliability, cost savings, etc. by using Hadoop kind of platforms. The will help shrink the trust gap existing between the enterprise customers and cloud computing philosophy making the enterprise cloud adoption a realistic possibility in the future.

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