Anyone can now run their software on Google's worldwide network of computers -- perhaps the most advanced computing system on earth -- and Google believes that, eventually, everyone will be happy to do so.
The tech giant is betting big on Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine, the cloud services that let outsiders run websites and other applications on its global computing infrastructure. Urs Hölzle -- the man who oversees this vast system -- says the company's cloud services allow businesses to run operate software more easily and more cheaply, without having to set up their own hardware, and though he acknowledges that many businesses are still wary of using the cloud, due to security concerns and regulatory issues, he argues that the computing world will evolve to the point where this is no longer the case.
But other big tech outfits see things quite differently. They believe that -- for security, regulatory, and other reasons -- some businesses will always run at least some of their software inside private data centers. "I think there will always, forevermore, be a balance between the public and the private," Lucas Carlson, who oversees cloud computing at internet service provider CenturyLink, recently told us.
HP -- the venerable Silicon Valley tech giant -- takes the same stance. So, in addition to offering public cloud services to the world at large, it has built complex software that businesses can use to run Google-like services in their own data centers. Google's services let you treat a vast collection of machines much like a single computer -- a more efficient way of handling things -- and HP's software is designed to operate in at least a similar way.
On Wednesday, HP took another important step down this road, saying it would open source two new software platforms, making them freely available to the world at large. These closely resemble the software platforms that underpin HP's own cloud service. The idea is that you can run applications in both places -- in the public cloud and in the private data center -- and maybe even move them from place to place, as need be.
The company is just one of many outfits promising much the same thing, including Rackspace, which helped build and open source popular software called Openstack, and Pivotal, which offers a platform known as CloudFoundry. HP's two software offerings are actually based on Openstack and CloudFoundry, but the company has expanded and enhanced them in recent years. "We have learned a lot about how to run Openstack at scale," says Bill Hilf, a longtime open source guru at IBM and Microsoft who now oversees cloud services at HP.
HP is releasing the two tools under a new brand name -- HP Helion -- and it promises to protect users from any intellectual property claims against the open source software. It also offers to help businesses setup and use these tools through a new professional services program.
According to research outfit Forrester, businesses are moving to public cloud services in big numbers. By 2020, the firm says, cloud computing will account for about 15 percent of the IT market, which spans all the hardware and software and services that companies use to run their operations. But many analysts and other industry watchers believe that certain companies -- especially those bound by government regulations, including financial and healthcare companies -- will keep certain applications running in their own data centers. "It's not about having everything running externally or everything running internally," says David Cearley, a vice president at Gartner Research. "It's about both."
That is what HP -- and so many others -- are banking on.
