After struggling for over a year to get a VMWare solution up and running robustly and then priced out for a recharge service, I find that our central IT group has done the job already and for not much more than we can do it for. Thus, there is really no reason to be in this particular business.
I did see this coming, it is pretty clear that cloud computing is the real next wave. VMWare is what established IT shops do, and will do, to make those 'private' clouds.
The real cloud computing outside of the private world, will be based on higher level abstractions than the Operating System. Since I have been an advocate of abolishing any user interface into an operating system (after all, are we not really trying to perform application logic?) it should come as no surprise that I would also advocate for cloud computing using interfaces or API's well above the operating system.
What people are going to want at the most primitive level is going to be Ruby on Rails servers, PHP servers, Java servers or some other programming abstraction (Hadoop?). Then they are going to want data management, but not file managment, I mean contextually relevant data management. That could be via database systems or it could be via something else. This is the developer level access to clouds.
But what even more people (non-developers) are going to want are applications that just work and do useful things. Contact managment systems, billing systems, mail systems, customer relationship systems, social networking, media sharing and purchasing, etc.....
So, my new career, should I choose to accept it, will most likely be trying to show end users in academic research, how to get what they want out of clouds. I would like to think that I will be part of building a private/public cloud to facilitate the transition, but I don't think that a group of my size can ever effectively be in the infrastructure business. I don't know what I was ever really thinking in trying to do that anyway....vanity maybe.
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