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In Standardized Cloud APIs? Yes, Don Macvittie takes on the opposing view held by editor Mike Fratto in Standardizing Cloud APIs Is Useless.

Gentlemen, you are both right.

In a previous blog entry, I noted the following:

One last comment on this business of vendor lock in and cloud storage APIs (another focus of the OpenStack announcement).  I would submit that, while a specific set of APIs has the potential to create vendor lock in, this is a much smaller problem than what is experienced in other technologies.  If you are really worried about it, you probably have never actually written a REST API call.  It is written in many languages, and we have seen cases where applications that run on S3 run unchanged on Mezeo.  Others need very minor modifications, and some are excited to take advantage of some of the unique Mezeo API based services.  It just is not a problem, and this is much more related to FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) and marketing zealotry than it is associated with technological reality.  The APIs of choice will shake out, and it is far too early to say if it will be S3, OpenStack, CDMI or a combination of all of these and others yet unknown. 

At Mezeo, we have never believed there will be one winner, and instead focused on architecture to enable easy and effective delivery of whichever APIs stand the test of time. The Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform API enables advanced services and programmatic access to Mezeo enabled storage clouds.   The Mezeo Interoperability API enables interoperability of applications developed for Amazon S3, Google and Eucalyptus based storage clouds. 

(Note:  we are soon announcing our first addition to the Interoperability API that will deliver the SNIA CDMI data management capability).

The interesting view that seems to be missing here is that marketplace competition by service providers already serves to drive down the price of cloud storage, so a commoditized stack embraced by most is unlikely to yield extraordinary incremental savings.  At the same time, while the competitive market conspires to drive cloud storage costs ever lower, the need to differentiate, and deliver solutions as well as a programmable storage to enable multiple new and exciting types of applications will rapidly replace the pure cost and scale focus of current cloud storage offerings.  Sometimes, the "new" application is simply enabling it in the cloud, to produce the same result at a lower cost!  This requires significant cloud storage functionality in order to make this easy and productive.  Amazon continues to prove this with their many additions and capabilities which differentiate their service.  Mezeo sees much the same view on the part of our customers.  Their focus is on what cloud storage can do, the problems it can solve, what business opportunities it creates and what new applications it enables.  All of these views assume it will be competitively priced.

So, should we ultimately and will we ultimately achieve some sort of "standardized" API for cloud storage and cloud computing?  YES! 

What benefits will it bring?  The usual ones we expect from standardization. 

Will it be a panacea and a reason to buy?  No, but it will ultimately be a reason not to buy.

Is it the most important thing all of us in the cloud space can do right now?  No, but supporting the standards bodies is, and your suppliers should have a position on that. 

I like practical business approaches.  That is why we try to look at cloud storage through the lens of what it can be used for, why that makes sense and why it is a big business opportunity.  We developed our Interoperability API to make it easy for cloud storage solution providers to use Mezeo enabled clouds.  We built the Mezeo API to provide a robust development environment for programmable storage.  Both are important.  We did not do either one to get engaged in the "which API will prevail" struggle for becoming a standard.  We support CDMI, and are beginning to utilize it where it makes sense and adds real business value. 

I would like to close by saying that standardization will be important, it will never be perfect and it is going to take some time.  In the meantime, what I do know is that there are excellent ways to use cloud storage to solve real business problems in new ways that will yield substantial business improvements, including savings.  If you are worried about vendor lock in, get your top technical people together and do two things:

1)    Make sure that you understand that converting from one API to another, while not the most productive or best use of time, is simply not that big a deal and;

2)    Remember that there are big market forces at work here, and that your cloud storage service suppliers will be bound as much by those versus being protected by their proprietary APIs!

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CLOUD STORAGE: A BUSINESS MODEL for THE ENTERPRISE

After looking at this snippet I decided to read the full paper from Appirio.  It actually says that 68% of "cloud adopters" expect to have the majority of their data and applications in the cloud within three years. 

What we are not told is the actual % of cloud adopters amongst medium and large enterprises. So, 68% of some subset of medium and large enterprises are racing to the cloud - not bad - but not the marketplace as a whole either.

Since "cloud adopters" are also early adopters, it comes as no surprise that they are rapidly moving to the cloud and will be done in three years.  They are also doing it because they intuitively understand that the cloud is the right thing to do, and they know that even if it is at best a break even proposition today, they will be the first to arrive at the true benefits.  Or, perhaps, they are solving something more problematic than others may be enduring, like poorly designed home grown applications, legacy application that are ready to cycle out, lack of capital for data center expansion, or any other of the many drivers that sends you to the cloud for a solution.

 Also, cloud adoption is slowed primarily by security concerns, and two concurrent activities are solving this problem on a daily basis.  One, IT organizations are winding up their early evaluations and figuring out what they can immediately live with in a cloud solution.  Second, improved security solutions are racing to market to solve these concerns associated with cloud based solutions, so more and more cloud capabilities are now deemed secure.  This trend will continue until security is no longer the blanket excuse for not becoming cloudy, and instead wide spread adoption will be governed by capacity, conversion capability, business case process and analysis, and the orderly march to the next generation of computing infrastructure.

I have a golden rule of IT technology adoption:  It always happens, and it always happens slower than the industry pundits suggest.  Cloud computing is no different.  As a matter of fact, it is very supportive of my golden rule of IT Technology, and is behaving in the usual, predictable fashion. Every time someone tries to convince me otherwise, I think about IBM, the mainframe, and the many occasions it was pronounced dead.  I went to that funeral twenty years ago and it is still growing strong.  How about the AS/400? Same story.  

Now is an exciting time to be in information technology.  What excites me about cloud computing is that it is an approach to computing service delivery that is driving significant technology investment and the promise of significant returns.  And, it is being delivered in the crucible of the open market, not by government edict, or with central planning, but with the chaos and creative destruction that only capitalism can provide.

Here’s the audio of my interview with Network World:

In essence, I cover the points I made in this blog post on OpenStack >>

Just read David Linthicum's post, A way out of the private cloud dead end. 

We discussed the advent of hybrid cloud in our earlier post on a maturity model for cloud storage. While it is important that technology providers are beginning to grapple with the requirements to move seamlessly from a private cloud to a public cloud, the assumption here is that the workload owner is willing to utilize a public cloud multi-tenant solution for their workload.  I'm not sure we're there yet.

It is unclear to me that the marketplace and especially the higher end enterprises  (who retain and own significant IT resources and data centers) are yet willing to embrace public multi-tenant clouds.  I know they'll eventually do so as the security solutions and their early experiences improve confidence in the public cloud.  Certainly there are non proprietary workloads that will be used for the earliest testing.  However, this is still a very nascent market, and you should expect that we have several years of work ahead of us to build out a fully functioning hybrid model that provides appropriate security and control.

I strongly agree that the level of activity is reminiscent of the late nineties.  The majors are trying to build out their cloud stacks, and they are doing that with internal development and by buying smaller companies focused on individual layers of the stack, or even a feature on the layer.  I looked at some "gee whiz" numbers from various research organizations, and saw that IDC postulates that more than one third of all digital information created on an annual basis will reside in, or at least pass through, the cloud at some point in its life cycle. 

Amazing!

According to a recent Gartner press release, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets by 2012:

Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks.

The need for computing hardware, either in a data center or on an employee’s desk, will not go away. However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry. For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or reskilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points.

This is a bold statement. If we believe Gartner, it means that we are at the beginning of an explosion in cloud-based services managed by trusted providers on behalf of the enterprise. Of course not all businesses will choose this path, but a substantial number of industries can and will. As I blogged about earlier, the message from the CFO office is clear. We will see adoption rates rise dramatically as the benefits of cloud services become more obvious to business leaders.

A second point of interest is the prediction that by 2012, India-centric IT services companies will represent 20 percent of the leading cloud aggregators in the market (through cloud service offerings).

Here’s the take-away:

Gartner is seeing India-centric IT services companies leveraging established market positions and levels of trust to explore nonlinear revenue growth models (which are not directly correlated to labor-based growth) and working on interesting research and development (R&D) efforts, especially in the area of cloud computing. The collective work from India-centric vendors represents an important segment of the market’s cloud aggregators, which will offer cloud-enabled outsourcing options (also known as cloud services).

We are witnessing examples of what GE innovation consultant Vijay Govindarajan calls reverse innovation in IT. Natarajan Chandrasekaran, the CEO of Tata Consultancy Services notes:

I’ve seen the new cloud-based computing models for applications and processes gaining currency in emerging markets. Rural cooperative banks and small and medium businesses in India are actually far ahead of their western counterparts in adopting these models. In fact, companies from emerging markets, buoyed by strong domestic revenues and revival in growth, have been making adjustments to their global strategies and fine-tuning their investments in order to be part of the recovery process in the west and build on their global expansion plans.

As the enterprise embraces the cloud, they’ll need a maturity model to help them on their journey. My next post will explore what the maturity model for cloud storage looks like. 

A recent report by Forrester's Andrew Reichman titled Business Users Are Not Ready For Cloud Storage: Current And Planned Adoption Of Storage-As-A-Service Is Minimal For Now paints a picture for cloud storage adoption, that at first blush, is not encouraging.

He states:

In Forrester's Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2009 survey, we asked businesses about their interest in "hosted storage capacity" offerings. Interest was minimal at best. Forty-three percent of all respondents said that they were simply not interested, and another 43% said that they were interested but had no plans to move forward.

While it could be argued that as a cloud storage supplier, I am necessarily bullish about the ultimate prospects, I believe the data is actually quite good and clearly represents what we are experiencing in the marketplace.  Now, Mezeo is engaged with many service providers, as well as the early adopters in the enterprise space as they begin their evaluations.

When I look at enterprise cloud-storage adoption based on Everett Rogers' diffusion curve I see a pretty clear view of the typical market place approach to adoption of disruptive technologies:    

For new, emerging, and potentially disruptive technologies, we should look for what the next practices are, i.e. the practices of the innovators and early adopters. The survey reflects the typical technology adoption cycle and re enforces what we are experiencing in the market place.

11% of companies are taking the plunge - these are the early adopters and innovators.  The early majority (43%) is interested, and watching.  The late majority is not in the game, yet.

So we are on track. And to prove it, let's look at one of these enterprise-level innovators: General Electric.

According to IBM storage expert Tony Pearson, GE has implemented cloud-based backups and archive for GE Corp, NBC Universal and GE Asset Management divisions running at only 32 cents per GB/month, representing a 40-60 percent savings over their previous methods. This includes backups of their external Web sites, archives of their digital and production assets, RMAN backups including development/staging databases. They plan to add out-of-region compliance archive in 2010. They also plan to monetize their intellectual property by offering "CloudStorage Manager" as a software offering for others.

Here's an interesting read on some of the issues that traditional file systems face which can now be overcome with an object-based system. 

According to the author, Beth Pariseau:

Unstructured data is expected to far outpace the growth of structured data over the next three years. According to the "IDC Enterprise Disk Storage Consumption Model" report released last fall, while transactional data is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.8%, it's far outpaced by a 61.7% CAGR predicted for unstructured data.

This is a direct result of the digital content explosion. 

Robin Harris, senior analyst at StorageMojo observes:

"There are going to be extreme amounts of data as things like digital video and mobile networks grow; in five years, pretty much every phone will be 'smart,'...All of us storage geeks agree on that, and different people are beginning to visualize what that kind of growth needs in terms of storage infrastructure."

The article makes the case to "Think APIs, not files."  In essence, the point is as follows (as explained by Harris):

"File systems make less sense over time as the amount of data grows. Architecturally, it makes more sense for each file to have a unique 128-bit ID and use an Internet-like system for locating that file; a URL points to an address and there are files at that address, and object-based storage interfaces are essentially operating on the same principle."

The result, writes Pariseau, is that "with an object ID replacing a file name, more extensive data can accompany an object than the simple 'created,' 'modified' or 'saved on' fields available in traditional file systems. Thus, detailed policies can be applied to objects for more efficient and automated management. Without NFS or CIFS to serve up files to applications, object-based storage systems need to replace that layer of abstraction between raw blocks of data on disk and files that applications can recognize. Today's object-based systems use standard APIs such as Representational State Transfer (REST) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), or proprietary APIs to tell applications how to store and retrieve object IDs.

One of our key decisions when we designed Mezeo was the adoption of object-based architecture for cloud storage.  Mezeo can use traditional file systems as object based systems to deliver cloud storage, and can also expose cloud storage as a traditional file system (even though it has objects underneath the covers, or as an object system).  This reflects our view that there will be a prolonged period of co-existence followed by a migration to object based systems.

If you'd like to learn more about how Mezeo offers an agnostic storage services platform for storage service providers (SSP), take a look at this paper (registration required) by the same Robin Harris: Building a scalable shared file infrastructure. The paper gives service providers an introduction to:

• Cloud storage applications and customer drivers
• Mezeo's storage architecture and options
• Basic shared file storage reference designs
  

In the paper, Harris says that there are multiple ways to build highly scalable storage for cloud storage applications. He tells us how SSPs can differentiate their offerings:

The Mezeo platform allows the special features of the storage to be delivered to customers, while giving SSPs a powerful platform on which to build a business. Understanding what storage choices will better meet target market needs is a critical success factor. SSPs can differentiate their cloud services by careful selection of back end storage systems. The Mezeo platform gives SSPs great flexibility. Understanding how to use that flexibility will be key to growing a successful cloud storage service business.

Harris also presents five reference configurations (see diagrams below) in the paper, which vary in performance, availability, scalability, self-management and, of course, cost.

CONFIGURATION # 1: NEXENTA





CONFIGURATION # 2: PERMABIT




CONFIGURATION # 3: PARASCALE




CONFIGURATION # 4: Red Hat Enterprise Linux




CONFIGURATION # 5: NetApp




DOWNLOAD:
Robin Harris' Building a scalable shared file infrastructure >>

We've discussed ITIL and Cloud Computing and the role of trust as a differentiator for service providers. Yes, we see the evidence that IT Hosting companies and managed service providers are closer to their customers and we see that their differentiation is their commitment to serving the customer.

But Amazon, Google, and Microsoft aren't going away. As they pressure customers to make the switch to the cloud, traditional service providers must find new ways to compete. Step one, of course, is providing alternatives - cloud services, like storage for example.  Step two is to highlight their customer commitment - the relationships they already have and defend this "advantage" by becoming even more responsive. 

So how do you build trust? According to Stephen Covey Jr. trust is built through behavior. His work has identified 13 behaviors which build trust:

1. Talk Straight
2. Demonstrate Respect
3. Create Transparency
4. Right Wrongs
5. Show Loyalty
6. Deliver Results
7. Get Better
8. Confront Reality
9. Clarify Expectations
10. Practice Accountability
11. Listen First
12. Keep Commitments
13. Extend Trust

But how do these behaviors translate to a cloud service delivery model? 

To answer this question, I dug up an old model for assessing service quality - SERVQUAL -  which was introduced to the world of service and retail back in 1988 (those were the days before ITIL).  SERVQUAL has its share of detractors, but even recent research reminds us that it is still a useful model.  In particular, I'm interested in how it can be used to help service providers improve and extend their intangible advantages over the more impersonal big shops.

Over the years, the SERVQUAL instrument has been a popular methodology used to measure consumers' perceptions of service quality. Its five generic dimensions or factors are still valid:

(1) Tangibles: physical facilities, equipment and appearance of personnel.
(2) Reliability: the ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately.
(3) Responsiveness: willingness to help customers and provide prompt service.
(4) Assurance: includes competence, courtesy, credibility and security; the knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to inspire trust and confidence.
(5) Empathy: includes access, communication, understanding the customer; caring and
individualized attention that the firm provides to its customers.

None of these dimensions will change in the cloud, with the exception that some of these dimensions are now virtual and must be proven online (customer support, for example) or through superior automation of work processes.

Let's also analyze the SERVQUAL "gap model," as it was called, and see how it applies to service delivery in the cloud:

Let's look at the meaning of each "gap" - the possible breakdown areas in service delivery:

Gap 1: Customers' expectations versus management perceptions: caused by the lack of a marketing research orientation, inadequate upward communication and too many layers of management.

Gap 2: Management perceptions versus service specifications: caused by an inadequate commitment to service quality, a perception of unfeasibility, inadequate task standardization and an absence of goal setting.

Gap 3: Service specifications versus service delivery: caused by role ambiguity and conflict, poor employee-job fit and poor technology-job fit, inappropriate supervisory control systems, lack of perceived control and lack of teamwork.

Gap 4: Service delivery versus external communication: caused by inadequate horizontal communications and propensity to over-promise.

Gap 5: The discrepancy between customer expectations and their perceptions of the service delivered: caused by the influences exerted from the customer side and the shortfalls (gaps) on the part of the service provider. In this case, customer expectations are influenced by the extent of personal needs, word of mouth recommendation and past service experiences.

Gap 6: The discrepancy between customer expectations and employees' perceptions: caused by the differences in the understanding of customer expectations by front-line service providers.

Gap 7: The discrepancy between employee's perceptions and management perceptions: caused by the differences in the understanding of customer expectations between managers and service providers.

Three of these gaps are directly connected external customers: Gap 1, Gap 5 and Gap 6.  Service providers will find their optimal "trust-building" opportunities here.  Apply Covey's 13 behaviors to each one of these gaps to build on your commitment to your customers.

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft aren't building a high-touch responsive model for their cloud services. But you, the service-provider, already have a high-touch relationship. Your cloud-based SLAs must reflect this advantage. The security issue is just a small part of this reality.

Service providers who dedicate themselves to closing the gaps will succeed in this new world.

The quest for quality service didn't start yesterday. I highly recommend that service providers give Delivering quality service: balancing customer perceptions and expectations by Valarie A. Zeithaml, A. Parasuraman, Leonard L. Berry, a second look.

Articles and blog posts associated with security and cloud computing are a daily occurrence, unless some well-publicized breach occurs in the cloud.  At that point the number of commentaries and discussions will increase exponentially, and then, over the following week, return to normal frequency.  I decided to focus on security as it relates to cloud storage, to see if something really new and different is occurring, and if overall changes need to be contemplated, as it comes to classic data security activities.  When I focused in this way, I quickly discovered that not much has changed, and security of data in the cloud is highly dependent on the same precautions and understandings as security of your data in a private data center.

In this recent article, it was suggested that files of one owner residing on a physical device with the files of others could somehow result in unauthorized access. It could, and the answer to this and a myriad of concerns fits within traditional approaches and understandings of security.   For example, Mezeo encrypts all files prior to storage.  So, even if you somehow got access to another's file, it would do you no good.  My point is that the cloud introduces a few additional complications, but it is not a problem that the current level of speculation seems to portray it as.  An extension to typical security practices, diligence, effective execution and audit of your current practices is what is required.

With this underlying theme, we look at how best we can ensure the security of the data in the cloud. Let's look at five areas that you should consider in regards to storing data in the cloud.

1. Physical Security: First, understand some things about the data center that is hosting the cloud where your data is stored:

• Is the data center physically secure? 
  
• What about it's ability to withstand power outages? 
  
• For how long? 
  
• Are there multiple, independent (on different grids) electrical power paths? 
  
• How are communications facilities enabled and where does the fiber enter the facility?
  
• How many communications providers have a POP (point of presence) at the facility? 
  
• How is the data center certified (SAS 70 Type II)?  

World class data centers are expensive, and they are also well understood.  What is the tier rating of the data center? (Tier IV is best). Make sure you do business with a cloud storage service provider who makes use of such facilities.

2. Data encryption: Encryption is a key technology for data security.  Understand data in motion and data at rest encryption.  Remember, security can range from simple (easy to manage, low cost and quite frankly, not very secure) all the way to highly secure (very complex, expensive to manage, and quite limiting in terms of access).  You and the provider of your Cloud Storage solution have many decisions and options to consider.  For example, do the Web services APIs that you use to access the cloud, either programmatically, or with clients written to those APIs, provide SSL encryption for access, this is generally considered to be a standard.  Once the object arrives at the cloud, it is decrypted, and stored.  Is there an option to encrypt it prior to storing?  Do you want to worry about encryption before you upload the file for cloud storage or do you prefer that the cloud storage service  automatically do it for you? These are options, understand your cloud storage solution and make your decisions based on desired levels of security.

3. Access Controls: Authentication and identity management is more important than ever.  And, it is not really all that different.  What level of enforcement of password strength and change frequency does the service provider invoke? What is the recovery methodology for password and account name?  How are passwords delivered to users upon a change?  What about logs and the ability to audit access?  This is not all that different from how you secure your internal systems and data, and it works the same way, if you use strong passwords, changed frequently, with typical IT security processes, you will protect that element of access.

4. Service Level Agreements (SLA): What kind of service commitment is your provider willing to offer you? Are they going to be up 99.9% of the time or 99.99% of the time? And how does that difference impact your ability to conduct your business? What is the backup strategy that your cloud provider uses, and does it include alternative site replication?  Do they use one at all, or is backup something you have to provide for?  Is there any SLA associated with backup, archive, or preservation of data.  If your account becomes inactive (say you don't pay your bill), do they keep your data?  For how long?  Once again, realize that there are different services, with different features, at different costs, and you get what you pay for.

5. Trusted Service Provider: The trusted service provider is a critical link.  Unlike your in-house IT department, you are now putting your trust in a 3rd party.  You must feel confident that they will do what they say they will do.  Can they demonstrate that the safeguards they claim are indeed delivered?  What is their record?  Do you have a successful business relationship with them already, and if not, do you know of others who do?  Remember, are they in business to serve business, or is it simply another service that they offer, focused first on cost per gigabyte, versus service and support.  This is where many IT service providers have made their living, providing world class service and support, along with effective, efficient, low cost infrastructure.

So what has really changed? More than anything it is a heightened awareness of the need for security.  Security is delivered on a sliding scale, and the result you achieve is based on well understood principles.

Of equal interest are the legal implications associated with hosting your data at service providers.  You can extend the notion of security to access by various government entities, depending on where your data is hosted.  While the focus of this post has been associated with preventing unauthorized access, this is yet another consideration associated with where your data is stored. 

Sure, cloud storage requires that you add some additional and/or different considerations to your evaluation and monitoring process, like understanding your service provider versus your own IT department.  The IT Service Providers know and understand the importance of this. Most will step up and ensure that they deliver excellent service to you and become your long term Trusted Partners. Those that don't will fall by the wayside.

Many Cloud Computing pundits have predicted that the early adopters will be largely comprised of small and mid-sized businesses.

Some new data from Forrester suggests that won't be the case.  

According to Forrester's Frank E. Gillett in Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong About Cloud IaaS, one out of four large companies plan to use an external provider soon, or have already employed one.  Furthermore, we learn that 33 per cent of large companies plan to use a service provider for Infrastructure-as-a-Service, while just 24 per cent want to run their own "private" clouds.

Industry commentators are surprised by Forrester's findings.

Naysayer Bernard Golden writes that what he found most surprising was that more than one-third of both large and medium enterprise companies are ready to put enterprise applications into production in external cloud providers. He also notes "interest in production app placement in external clouds is nearly as high as for test/dev."

Mary Hayes Weier joins the chorus as well, and says that the Forrester report proves that "conventional wisdom is wrong."

The question is why.  Why are large companies challenging convention and turning to external service providers?

It's the economics.  We see that cloud computing brings a disruptive and liberating pricing model to infrastructure. Why sink capital costs into infrastructure when you don't have to?
The cloud brings game-changing pricing and service capabilities to disaster recovery, fault tolerance, geographic redundancy, and other solutions that until now have been prohibitively expensive to everyone except for the largest organizations in the world. And now even these large organizations are not about to look the other way. They are looking at ways to optimize their IT and improve their cash flow.  Why spend money up front when you can pay as you play?

Steve and I have been saying this all along, and now we're glad to see the evidence has reached the mainstream.

On this blog, we've talked about GE and Bechtel - and their enterprise level cloud computing plans. We've emphasized that it is the IT service providers who have the core competencies - the people and the ITIL processes to deliver the promise of cloud computing to the enterprise.  Enterprise hosting companies are already positioned to deliver cloud computing services to the enterprise market, and before long we think dedicated hosters who succeed in fully automating the purchase, provisioning and support of the physical/hardware layer (some would say, the commodity layer) will move up market in a Christensensian assault on the enterprise market.

As described by Nick Carr in The Big Switch, IT hosting is in the process of transforming to electric-utility-like status.  We will think of IT hosters as providing IT infrastructure as a service, and we will want to "plug in" to these providers as we plug in to the power grid today.