“Datagarden’s CEO just told me, in public, that a cloud is a nothing more then a virtualized Data Center. No API required.”

Systems management centric thinkers do not get the cloud – and by current measures may never get it. I implore you, why?

Systems management software is generally founded on managing a highly variable, heterogeneous and diverse set of data-center resources. They sell a dream of a dynamic, agile enterprise–and deliver useful incremental improvements to management and monitoring. They are invaluable to the current enterprise architecture–but they are not a cloud.

Systems management is fundamentally a system administrator focused technology and always will be. The yearly R&D for HP’s systems management business is over $1B; and yet they have never released a product as revolutionary as humble book seller Amazon’s cloud products. Why?

Clouds ideally express themselves to consumption points (request, receive), vs. management views (inspect, adjust) . But the revolutionary thing about a cloud is not what it offers for consumption, but what it doesn’t.

Mr. Datacompost Datagarden CEO doesn’t get it because he leaves two important characteristics out (2/2!): the constraining factor, and the expression factor.

What he really seems to be saying is that there isn’t anything new, from a systems management perspective about a cloud–but his ‘only a VDC’ comment isn’t therefore an expression of truth, but merely one of his raging technological solipsism, given that he is a management software vendor.