BMC Software Leverages Amazon Web Services to Simplify Deployment and Management of Cloud Environments
I feel that BMC's PR on Cloud Computing needs a little explanation as it has the word cloud computing is often mistaken for SaaS. BMC's parntership with Amazon EC2 will help users to move their Software Installation to the cloud. It is NOT BMC's software moving to the cloud.
There's a big difference, let me explain.
First, What is Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 is Virtualized Infrastructure as Service. Let's take an example, how will a small business run apps and offer a service? They have to rent / own data centers, they have to buy their own hardware and server software and then hire specialists to manage datacenters. Over time this non-core function takes a lot of resources which is not the core focus of business. Amazon EC2 helps you with an Infrastructure virtualization solution. With EC2, you can instanly provision any type of server hardware you want and choose the software and within minutues your server is ready. You can even remote control the machine. This helps you rapidly scale up or downsize infrastructure in minutes. All you have to pay is a monthly charge for usage of machine and bandwidth. To get a little more under the hood, Amazon EC2 is an improved offering based on Xen Hypervisor, an open source insfrastructure virtualization.
Hosting Your App in EC2 Is Not SaaS, Why?
Hosting an application in Amazon EC2 is not SaaS because you have just moved the app installation from your own datacenter to Amazon cloud or virtualized data center. There is no magic that will automatically give scalability and multi-tenancy to your apps.Yes, you can do a PR with a word cloud computing, this is not SaaS by any measure.
Where is the AMI package for Remedy and Service Desk Express
If there was something that could have really helped is the link for Remedy or product AMI. An AMI instance is a special package for a direct deployment in Amazon EC2. An AMI is nothing but an image of you app with the OS, once you got this ready. This will help customers to pay and fire up an AMI, they will get product installated almost immediately.
I was unable to find any AMI for BMC products, I only found people asking for it.
http://www.nabble.com/Remedy-in-Amazon-Computing-Cloud--td23276709.html
So How Will BMC + Amazon EC2 help users?
In my opinion, there is only one useful thing.
BMC Atrium creating dynamic AMI instances in EC2: Although this is not a killer feature, I think it will help users really if you can create and provision server hardware from the request itself. It will be a simple api call to fire up a machine instance. Alteast the user does not have to switch between two different services.
Enterprise customers can request computing resources – either internal (physical or virtual) or external from Amazon EC2 – through an integrated self-service portal.
I really not sure how this is even a feature to be quoted as it is just an option in the self service request form.
I Expected Something really Bigger and Better
I like BMC because they have been solving real ITSM problems for large customers for a long time. Most new players are able to break and offer similar solution because of they cracked the problem earlier. When Kia Behnia hinted in his blog about a Cloud offering, I was expecting something big.
This is not it.
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