The Building Blocks for a Self-Service Cloud

As a recent Forrester report argued, many companies lack the infrastructure and the expertise to make the move to cloud computing, and this coalition hopes that its platform can help them make that step with a self-service solution. Certainly, the companies involved offer key pieces to do so, both in terms of infrastructure and software: Eucalyptus helps transform a company's current resources into a scalable infrastructure. newScale enables on-demand provisioning, policy-control enforcement, and usage billing. rPath automates software and systems deployment and maintenance. And MomentumSI handles the implementation.

Arguing that a "one-size-fits-all" approach will not work for the enterprise, the coalition hopes that this self-service model will be able to address the specific needs of specific enterprises.

Initiatives, Coalitions, and a Very Competitive Market

It's hard not to draw comparisons here between this coalition and the open source OpenStack initiative announced in late July. OpenStack, whose participants include Rackspace and one-time Eucalyptus customer NASA, also offers the building blocks for the cloud.

The number of companies offering private cloud solutions seems to be on the rise, and there will be no way for the market to sustain them all. And while it makes sense that Eucalyptus, newScale, rPath, and MomentumSI join forces to offer their self-service solution, it's not clear if having a coalition will be enough to win business in a very competitive space.