With scores of new cloud companies popping up and so many existing players jumping on the cloud bandwagon, we wondered where the traditional enterprise networking vendors stood?
Slideshow: 10 most powerful cloud companies
Were they guilty of "cloudwashing" - slapping the cloud label on existing products? Were they ignoring the cloud and risking getting left in the dust? Were they scrambling to re-invent themselves as cloud service providers?
Turns out that companies like Cisco and Juniper, CA and Citrix are sticking to their core strengths and positioning themselves as enablers of the cloud, providing the underlying hardware and software just like they've been doing for enterprise and service provider customers for decades.
Cloud computing disrupts the vendor landscape
CA Technologies addresses the public cloud in three ways: helping enterprises understand how to use it; enabling service providers to build it; and, managing customers' expectations about how operating in the cloud will change how they do business.
Using the public cloud - whether you are talking about IaaS, PaaS or SaaS -- requires discipline, says Andi Mann, CA technologies vice president of enterprise and cloud solutions. "You can't just throw mission critical applications with personally identifiable information up there because you are going to run into compliance, security, privacy, licensing and performance issues.''
To help customers determine the right applications and the right timing, CA wraps consulting services around several of its portfolio, project and capacity planning, and design and modeling tools in a program called Cloud 360.
The two main products are AppLogic, which enables IT departments and service providers to rapidly build and deploy cloud applications and Automation Suite for Cloud, a cloud management suite that offers application deployment and workload management and provides a single interface for controlling both private-cloud and public-cloud resources.
"This gives service providers the turnkey underpinning they need to build out a public cloud service that can compete with the Amazons and the Rackspaces, but with the security, auditing and reliability in place to attract the more conservative enterprise customers," Mann says.
On a more general level, Mann argues that all of CA's infrastructure, application and security management tools can be used to allow an enterprise to closely monitor its activity in the cloud and the data collected can be used to help them transform how they do business there.
"If a business unit is now responsible for allocating its own IT consumption, they had better have a good handle on what they are paying for," Mann says.
