The State of Cloud Computing in Japan

During this week's Cloud Computing Expo, I had an opportunity to meet with a new Japanese Cloud Service Provider. This company, KDDI, is the second largest telco in Japan, and offers a wide range of network-based services, including colo and managed hosting. It has now moved into offering IaaS cloud services (starting roughly six months ago), basing its offering on well-known cloud infrastructure software company 3tera. I found our conversation really interesting, for the following reasons:

KDDI chose 3tera because of its "superior GUI," which sounds like a bit of an odd reason. In following up on the discussion with 3tera, it seems that superior GUI was shorthand for 3tera's GUI driven dynamic, scalable provisioning. In other words, 3tera provides the ability for end users to directly provision their own instances, with 3tera software dynamically scaling the application infrastructure as needed.

If you look at my company's cloud services taxonomy diagram, you can see that we place agile provisioning and scalability as a core user-level service. Too many IT organizations define cloud computing as improved operations, rather than treating it for what it is: a way for end users (i.e., the application groups) to control their own infrastructure. 3tera's product enables end user provisioning, which KDDI clearly recognized as necessary for its offering.

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Another really interesting item was the typical company profile KDDI identified as currently using the cloud offering. According to KDDI's experience, enterprises are not really using the cloud to create dynamically scalable apps, but instead treating the infrastructure as dynamically provisioned hosting. It specifically identified dynamic provisioning of clustered RAC as a use case for enterprises. In other words, enterprises are not yet using the cloud characteristics of the KDDI cloud.

However, system integrators (SI) are using the KDDI cloud as an infrastructure for "cloudy" apps. KDDI described how SIs are using the KDDI cloud to create SaaS applications, although it wasn't clear to me if that means that SIs are porting packaged software products to SaaS capability, or if SIs are moving enterprise apps into the cloud and calling them SaaS. This ambiguity might be ascribed to the fact that the conversation was carried on through a translator, who, though she seemed pretty tech-savvy, might have been somewhat inaccurate when translating the new concepts of cloud computing from one language to another.

When queried as to whether enterprises were making any use of the KDDI cloud for "real" cloud applications, the gentleman from KDDI mentioned experiments and pilot implementations. It seems that, despite the cloud offering coming from a well-known provider like KDDI, enterprises are moving very deliberately toward embracing the cloud. One thing I neglected to ask was the actual uptake of the KDDI cloud offering; it always seems like the really interesting questions present themselves after the conversation!