As Chief Scientist (or Chief Boffin, if you like), I spend a significant amount of time participating in industry, partner and customer events alike. This week is a great example, as I will be speaking at both All About the Cloud and the Citrix Synergy event in San Francisco. I will be covering similar ground on both occasions – the general idea is that the world does not revolve around “the cloud.” In fact, “the cloud” tends to be good for certain things and not so good for others. The challenge is that many customers seem to think that cloud is a panacea, solving all of their problems. Often, customers come to us with a blurred idea of why they want cloud, sometimes defaulting to, “the CEO says we need some cloud.”

My presentation at the All About the Cloud event is going to focus on the cloud question by trying to understand what each tool does well and so you can deploy accordingly to ensure needs are met. I’ll provide a backdrop market growth and then dive into dedicated, virtual and hybrid (cloud + dedicated) solutions with an eye to understanding each solution in broad terms … As an aside, I wanted to show up with a drill, a nail and a chunk of 2×4 to demonstrate this: I was going to pound the nail into the board with the drill, and then I was told this would be a bad idea. I may yet show up with some tools – all I need is a Home Depot close to the Palace Hotel!

The Citrix presentation is not quite so bold – well, it did not involve props in its initial incarnation. For the Synergy crowd, I’ll speak to a few case studies that leverage hybrid solutions to best meet their needs. Specifically, I will discuss companies that have deployed cloud + dedicated, SoftLayer dedicated + someone else’s cloud (the horror!) and an enterprise example with a mix of internal data center assets and SoftLayer assets.

The enterprise example is an interesting one and it is timely given what Citrix is up to. Part of the challenge with most enterprise customers is the fact that many have invested significant capital (both dollars and the human variety) in their own infrastructure. This often means that an additional level of complexity is introduced as the enterprise must consider how to bridge the gap between their own infrastructure and another, external (hopefully a SoftLayer) environment.

Citrix is about to launch Cloud Bridge which will help to manage through some of this – the offering enables customers to transparently connect their own data centers with an off premise cloud environment. SoftLayer can make this happen in two ways. Cloud Bridge will sit within Netscaler Platinum offering that we support and customers will have the ability to deploy themselves should they choose to.

I will follow up on this blog with some depth that covers both presentations, as I think this is a conversation worth continuing. In the meantime, I am off to find a Home Depot …

-Nathan