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Home > Cloud computing News > Verizon enters the cloud market |
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Joseph Crawford, the executive director of product management for IT at Verizon, said the company runs CaaS out of its Beltsville, Md., data center and that currently it is a small deployment. He estimated some thousands of virtual machines and several hundred physical machines, representing a small corner of the data center's 100.000-square-foot capacity.
Offering hybrid infrastructure
"We have a history of letting customers come [into the data center] to do audits," said Crawford. He said Verizon has the enterprise customer squarely in its sights. Security and compliance are two of the biggest concerns for enterprises evaluating cloud services. Verizon hopes that it can draw users that might have hosted, virtual front-end apps with valuable data tucked safely away in-house by offering both animals in the same "virtual farm." So by offering both infrastructure models, Verizon is banking on broadening its appeal.
But how much? Verizon plans to build up its CaaS portal to offer a range of targeted services such as database and messaging stacks, paralleling cloud leader Amazon's outgrowth of services from its infrastructure service. "We absolutely view [CaaS] as a platform in which we are going to layer" premium services over the infrastructure offerings, Crawford said. Chris Alvord, CEO of Washington, D.C.-based COOP Systems, is a Verizon Business hosting customer and believes in Verizon's infrastructure, although he's not terribly interested in the new offerings. COOP provides disaster recovery planning for large private-sector companies, including hospitals and major New York financial firms, and he said instant-on computing isn't a draw for companies that like their data center's overengineered by 20 times of what's needed. He already considers COOP a cloud consumer, since the firm uses Verizon's online backup services. Between backups and dedicated hosting purchased at Verizon, COOP has done its homework on Verizon's capabilities and the firm is comfortable offering "four nines," or 99.99%, uptime for its clients. Verizon is "obviously not Joe-blow cloud computing here," Alvord said. But today, Alvord wouldn't choose Verizon CaaS for critical needs even though he trusts Verizon's SLAs. "For emergency response, [the infrastructure] has to already be there," he said.
Interesting choice of dance partners Lyman said Verizon needs to show it's in tune with open source and the cloud. But he noted that its choice of partners suggests the company is hedging. "Open source is associated with a lack of [vendor] lock-in and cost reductions," he said, adding that the uncanny mix of Linux leader RHEL on fenced-in VMware is Verizon's way of showing that it has abilities in all departments. He said that since the mobile platform market is so wide open, with Linux, Android and WinCE all jockeying for space on ever-more capable handhelds, Verizon wants a trusty provider of a wide array of technology. With more than 3,000 independent software vendors under its wing creating products, Red Hat Inc. is a decent bet.Lyman compared Verizon's CaaS play to Cisco Systems Inc.'s move into the server and data center market. He said that Verizon has the muscle and the reliable infrastructure to set up a small corner of one of its data centers as a cloud just to prove it can, and let big consumers see its stamina in the young cloud market.
Carl Brooks is a Technology Writer for SearchCloudComputing.com. Write to him at cbrooks@techtarget.com. And check out our Troposphere blog.
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