Terms were not disclosed but here’s how Dell described its new acquisition:

“Enstratius is available as software-as-a-service or as on-premise software that enables full control from within a customer’s data center, or via a hosted service … and complements the capability Dell recently acquired from Gale Technologies, now Active System Manager (ASM), by providing enhanced multi-cloud management and application configuration capabilities and integrates converged offerings with cloud systems management.”

For the past few years, Dell has plotted a tricky course as it tried to morph from a PC and server vendor to a provider of software, cloud and managed services. Toward that end it has bought companies ranging from Wyse and Boomi to bolster its cloud credibility and Quest Software for its data center management and automation tools. Like its rivals in traditional IT — companies including HP and IBM, Dell faces growing competition for enterprise and webscale workloads from Amazon Web Services. 

Update: As Dell rolled out its going-private game plan, GigaOM’s Derrick Harris counseled it to get serious about buying up real cloud expertise, which it apparently has.

Here’s how GigaOM described Enstratus (the company added the “i” a few months ago) in reporting the company’s $3.5 million Series A funding in 2011:

“EnStratus is similar to the more widely known RightScale service, although enStratus actually supports more clouds. It currently claims support for Amazon Web Services, AT&T Synaptic Storage, Bluelock, Cloud Central, Cloud.com, CloudSigma, EMC Atmos (e emc), Eucalyptus, Google Storage, GoGrid, Nimbula, OpenStack, Rackspace, Terremark, VMware vSphere, VMware vCloud Express and Windows Azure.”

Not surprisingly, George Reese, CTO of Minneapolis-based Enstratius, said Dell and his company align well. Enstratius runs a tight ship and has managed to stake a claim in enterprise cloud management with “just Series A financing,” Reese said via email.

Reese added that Dell:

“Sees cloud management as a key value point in the cloud computing stack. By acquiring us, they acquire established leadership in cloud management aimed at enterprise needs. Customers don’t want a single solution on a single stack, they want a solution that enables them to interact with many different cloud platforms, public and private. The Enstratius acquisition immediately gives Dell leadership in this area over other large technology vendors.”

Dell ownership gives Enstratius more resources to attack that market faster, he added.

At least one Wall Street analyst agreed (Dell is still trading until its restructuring is complete): Wells Fargo’s Maynard Um characterized the Enstratius buy as a good use of cash. In a research note, Um wrote:

“We believe the acquisition signals 1) management remains focused strategically on transforming the company and 2) from an industry perspective, the importance of being agnostic (though we expect tight integration with Dell’s owned-portfolio).”

This news comes just an hour or so after Quest competitor BMC announced plans to take itself private. Which just goes to show, if you don’t like the current IT landscape now, just wait a minute.

This story was updated at 8:47 a.m. PDT with more context about Dell’s cloud strategy  and Wells Fargo comments.

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There’s a paradox in the cloud vendor community. All the players agree there is tons of demand for cloud and cloud services — at least for their cloud and their cloud services. The future is bright, the upside enormous.  But when pressed, many also say that we’re due for lots of consolidation — that there really isn’t market demand for umpteen different cloud flavors and the vendors that sell them. In short demand is great for my cloud, but not nearly enough for all these other guys’ clouds.

Last week’s news that Xeround is shutting its doors sparked this talk anew. Xeround gave users of its free database service just over a week to vacate the premises and paying customers two weeks. There have been other examples of cloud services shutting down.

One cloud watcher who requested anonymity because he works with many of these services said many companies who “tried to do free have gotten their heads handed to them. And other cloud services companies are consolidating the number of cloud infrastructures they support because “API bloat has gotten horrific.”
So what goes on here? The gist is we are really early in the cloud business and there will be a ton of work. But is there enough work for 90 different OpenStack players plus CloudStack plus Eucalyptus along with Amazon? Or 50 cloud database providers or Platform-as-a-Service providers? Um, not so sure.

In an interview at the OpenStack Summit last month, OpenStack executive director Jonathan Bryce applied his own paradox when asked if he expected there to be more or fewer OpenStack players going forward. “The answer is both. Over time you’ll see a greater variety of vertically oriented flavors of OpenStack — versions built for highly secure, highly regulated workloads but you’ll also see a number of general-purpose versions that will solidify.” Solidify. Hmm.

At the summit, HP cloud master Saar Gillai said he expects consolidation. OpenStack is much more complex than Linux — it includes complicated networking and storage as well as compute aspects. Building and testing all that takes money and if a company cannot make money off its work, it won’t be in the business long.

Given all that would-be cloud deployers really need to assess the risks — and mitigate them going in, as Derrick Harris wrote Friday.

When is a cloud not a cloud?

Amazon, the dominant public cloud company, is sick of the hype around private clouds. All too often these private implementations do not offer the true benefits of a public cloud, at least according to Andrew Jassy, SVP of Amazon Web Services.

At Amazon’s Global Summit Series event in San Francisco last week,  Jassy slammed private cloud purveyors for selling what is not, in actuality, a cloud at all. Citing a survey by Forrester Research, just 24 percent of companies surveyed had self-service provisioning; 14 percent could charge back costs to their departments; and 27 percent had built resource automation, according to Nancy Gohring over at ITWorld. 

Covering the same event, The Wall Street Journal quoted other Forrester numbers however. These hold that nearly one-third (31 percent) of companies in North America and Europe have deployed private clouds with another 17 percent planning go do so by next year. On the other hand, just 10 percent say they have adopted public cloud with another 7 percent saying they plan to do so. No wonder AWS is so grumpy especially given the emphasis it’s put on winning over enterprise workloads that go beyond test-and-dev and that it will face more public cloud competition — from HP, from VMware, from Pivotal, from IBM( s ibm), going forward.

It was interesting that, at the same event, AWS trotted out Nokia to talk about moving its analytics over to AWS’ RedShift, given Nokia’s tight relationship with Microsoft in the mobile phone arena. In mid-April Microsoft made its Azure IaaS, which competes with AWS, broadly available. One might think Microsoft would really, really want companies like Nokia to use Azure.

Oh, and by the way, last week Microsoft said its cloud business reaped $1 billion in sales over the past 12 months, a figure that raised many eyebrows. The cloud number includes Azure but also software deployed at sites run by partners — partners like Rackspace and Amazon. We live in a complicated world.

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HP is shipping the Slate 7 with Android 4.1. That’s close to current, but of course Google’s own product ships with the latest version: Android 4.2. It’s also very likely to get software updates faster. Both tablets include 1 GB of memory. HP’s Slate 7 has 8 GB of internal storage capacity with support for an additional 32 GB of micro SD expansion. The Nexus 7 with 16 GB of storage doesn’t have a micro SD card slot.

Both tablets have front-facing video cameras for chatting, but here the Slate 7 one-ups the Nexus: HP added a 3 megapixel camera to the rear of the tablet. HP also included support for Beats Audio sound.  There’s not much difference in the size and weight of the two tablets, which is not surprising given that both have 7-inch screens. The Nexus 7 wins out here, however, using a 1280 x 800 display. HP opted for a 1024 x 600 screen, which is the same low resolution on the 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab I bought in 2010.

Unless you really need a rear camera or micro SD card slot on your 7-inch tablet — or just have to have Beats Audio support — I’d probably spend the extra $30 on the Nexus 7 if you can swing the money. And if you’re in the market for a small slate right now, I’d even consider waiting a few short weeks. Google’s I/O Developer event takes place in mid-May and it was at last year’s event that Google introduced its Nexus 7. A refresh could be in the works, meaning either more tablet for your dollar or last year’s model at a lower price could be coming.

It’s certainly good to see HP get into the mobile market with a new tablet, especially since the HP TouchPad was a billion-dollar bust. The company needs to step it up though when it comes to hardware. It’s 2013, not 2010 and people are starting to expect higher-resolution displays in their laptops and their tablets to help improve the experience.

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If you’ve taken part in CSA (community-assisted agriculture) program you know you get a bin of in-season fruits and veggies every other week or so — hopefully from a local farm. In that bin will be a few tomatoes, radishes, whatever and a ton of kale, which grows easily and big and is forgiving of bad weather. It’s prolific and it’s cheap. Then you find dishes and recipes to use that kale.

And this is where the fun begins: Kale, it turns out, can be used in everything. In chicken soup, in salads. It can be coated with sesame oil and roasted to make kale chips (my favorite). It can be sliced and diced in myriad ways. It can be boiled, fried (or sauteed, if you’re a fancypants) and baked. And it’s good for you.

Proponents would like to say the same about OpenStack.

OpenStack — in cable, in marketing, on a stick

Look at the various packages and delivery modes coming online: Red Hat this week announced the rollout of its RDO OpenStack distribution, “a freely available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and their derivatives.” Piston Cloud (see disclosure) offers what InformationWeek called OpenStack on a stick, the software packed on a memory stick for easy deployment. Nebula just brought out its OpenStack-in-a-box controller for linking legacy applications into the OpenStack arena. HP cloud guru Saar Gillai talked up his company’s “hardened” OpenStack for enterprise use. Cloudscaling offers an OpenStack cloud that will burst into Amazon or Google public clouds as needed.

More to the point is that end-user organizations — not just the usual tech vendor suspects —  showed off some ways they actually use OpenStack. These included a new Comcast online interactive cable TV guide that helps users quickly navigate their hundreds of channels to find the sporting event they want to see and bring it up on screen for a quick score check. There’s also Hubspot’s use of OpenStack to build a hybrid cloud that powers and helps target its inbound marketing campaigns. Whether or not you want to get targeted in-bound marketing, these are real use cases for the technologies that will impact actual users.

Key to OpenStack success? Making it disappear

As Florian Otel, head of HP Cloud Services in EMEA, told a session on enterprise use of OpenStack, that many of the technical gaps in the software have been filled over the past year and folks now have to focus on real customer value.

“Remember how many years we heard this would be the year of Linux on the desktop? That never happened. Android is what it took to make Linux attractive to desktop users,” he said. By bundling the underlying technology with hardware and a problem to solve and an application to solve it, Linux in another guise is hugely popular, he said. For those who would quibble with his Linux analogy, he added: “Linux has as much to do with Android as iOS has to do with BSD.

The same will be true for OpenStack he noted. As it becomes a platform or an enabler for higher-level services, it will take off.

Now, to get back to kale: The metaphor unravels a bit because most folks use kale as an adjunct to other foods (although not always) while the goal is for OpenStack to be the basis for a whole realm of services — for enterprise users, for mobile users, for fill-in-the-blank constituencies.

The big question this time next year will be how much of OpenStack is being consumed by the masses — whether they know it or not.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user by Nick Saltmarsh

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Bundling is good, but integration is always better in the consumer world, since most consumers may not have any idea that they want gesture-based controls or even why. Leap’s system works like a Kinect with an exterior piece of hardware attached to the computer that detects hand motions with a high degree of accuracy — within 1/100th of a millimeter. As for why someone might want this on their machine, it’s an enabler for new types of computing experiences.

When the company raised an additional $30 million earlier this year, I wrote how excited I was at the potential for gesture-controls to change how we think of the PC by enabling new applications like molding clay, manipulating spreadsheets in 3-D or playing an instrument. From the post:

That’s a nice win in the computing space, but the real question for me is can a new UI change how we interact with computers, and perhaps help keep the PC relevant? David Holz, the a co-founder and CTO of Leap told me that he helped invent the product because he wanted to do things on his computer, like play an instrument or make a model, that were made far too complicated by the existing programs limited by drop down menus necessitated by having a keyboard or mouse interface.

This deal with HP may help drive the adoption of more of those Leap-specific applications by helping deliver a larger audience for developers. Already Leap has sent out 12,000 units for free to developers to prime the pump for new applications, but now it needs to give those programmers an audience. As is always the case with a new user interface platform, it could be the most awesome experience since the touch screen, but if people don’t use it, the apps won’t arrive.

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San Francisco-based Cloudscaling is one of the new-look OpenStack cloud providers. Unlike HP, IBM, Red Hat and even Rackspace, it doesn’t have to retrofit OpenStack into its legacy hardware or software and instead can focus on new applications and workloads.

On Monday, Cloudscaling said it’s teaming up with Juniper Networks and will use that company’s Virtual Network Control to enable a new Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) feature that maps to VPCs in Amazon’s public cloud. Cloudscaling said its VPC can isolate elastic cloud resources from the outside world “without sacrificing the core benefits of elastic clouds.” Juniper and Cloudscaling will also work together to deploy Cloudscaling’s Open Cloud System 2.5 in customer accounts.

Cloudscaling CEO Michael Grant.

The advantage of partnering with Juniper is that the company — by virtue of its acquisition of Contrail Networks — is moving into the software-defined networking market, Cloudscaling CEO Michael Grant said in an interview. SDN support means companies can rely on standard, inexpensive hardware and reconfigure it as needed in software.

Cloudscaling is much smaller than many of its OpenStack colleagues/competitors and it made waves by announcing support for not only AWS APIs but with Google Compute Engine APIs as well — a bet that GCE, when it comes out of preview mode, will become the second largest public cloud available, Grant said. Fidelity with key AWS services is crucial — hence the new VPC capability — because the goal is to let customers move workloads and data up into the biggest of the big public cloud infrastructure with minimal muss and fuss. Oh, and bring it back down again, as needed.

Hewlett-Packard has likewise made a big bet on OpenStack and this week said it has enabled HP CloudSystem, its private cloud, to “burst” workloads into other clouds. The Register has a more in-depth look here. Also by virtue of its support for the latest Openstack’s “Grizzly” release, OpenStack customers can use HP’s 3Par virtual storage. One key benefit of Grizzly is that it lets companies  mix and match storage subsystems from different vendors and manage them from one console.

With so many OpenStack clouds, what about interop?

Now that there are so many OpenStack clouds coming on line, the OpenStack Foundation and its members will have to address nagging concerns about interoperability between the various open source clouds.

The OpenStack challenge is to offer a common denominator of interoperable technology that also acts as a foundation for higher-level services that vendors can provide.

As Cloudscaling CTO (and OpenStack Foundation board member) Randy Bias explained recently: “The foundation needs to put a stamp on OpenStack — something like SQL 92  in the database world. Every [major relational] database — SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, runs that set of commands but then they diverge.The foundation’s intention in the short term is to put a stake in the ground around that baseline interop.”

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Big IT vendors, telcos and hosting companies have watched Amazon’s growing dominance in public cloud computing with concern and that’s why many of them — AT&T, IBM, HP and Red Hat, soon to be joined by Ericsson and JuniperNetworks et al. — have glommed onto OpenStack, as an open-source cloud underpinning to jump-start their efforts. Now, Rackspace says it can give them an even better head-start, sharing all its best practices and blueprints for OpenStack-based public clouds.

Rackpace CTO John Engates said telcos and service providers have “approached us for years about helping them to get into the cloud business — they want the same category of service that we offer specifically around OpenStack … They want to go faster without having to do all the heavy lifting. They see us as uniquely positioned in that we know how to operate OpenStack, we have a public cloud.”

A federated set of OpenStack clouds

As part of this program, Rackspace will specify hardware and software infrastructure “powered by OpenStack” and handle automated testing and delivery of updates. It will likewise take care of patching, tuning and monitoring the resulting cloud with “carrier-grade”  service level agreements or SLAs.

Rackspace CTO John Engates

Scott Sanchez, director of strategy for the San Antonio, Texas company, described what could emerge as a network of interconnected OpenStack-based clouds, operated by different telcos but all federated to support multi-national companies as needed. “We’ll treat their data centers as our data centers. they’ll all run technology that is interconnected, we can link them all. So customers of one provider will see all the zones of all the providers in this network,” he said.

In some ways Rackspace’s pitch to embed its OpenStack into third-party clouds mimics VMware’s initial go-to-market for vCloud Director. VMware’s vision initially focused on moving legacy applications to the cloud while Amazon attacked new applications, said Gary Chen, IDC research manager for cloud and virtualization software. But now, VMware  and Amazon are encroaching on each other’s turf and different flavors of OpenStack, depending on the provider, are attacking both old and new applications as well.

Target: Amazon Web Services

Rackspace would not name any telcos or service providers who have signed on, but Sanchez said telcos that are the incumbents or dominate in a given region are likely prospects.

With the latest, seventh release of OpenStack, code-named Grizzly, OpenStack has gained maturity and features but still lags far behind features and functions that Amazon has churned out since the AWS launch in 2007. But the desire for an AWS alternative remains strong.

“This is all about OpenStack as a global infrastructure-as-a-service platform available to customers in every geography,” Engates said.

Sanchez shrugged off the notion that Rackspace may be fostering more competition for its own cloud services: “In a way we did that three years ago when we took our code and open sourced it to people who may have been considered our competitors. The goal here is to help people be more successful as cloud providers.”

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user SOMKKU

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I have no numbers for the AWS event but as of Tuesday night, the count for OpenStack Summit is 2,400 registered attendees up from 1,314 for last year’s San Diego extravaganza, according to an OpenStack source with access to that data. (The data is here and here is a readable, updated count.)

Rackspace, HP pack OpenStack show

Rackspace, one of OpenStack’s granddaddies along with NASA — has registered 199 216 people — a number which one OpenStack member characterized as overkill. Hewlett-Packard, depending on how you count or spell it, has 169 171 people or so on tap. Here’s how that list breaks out: HP (85), Hewlett Packard with no dash (30); Hewlett-Packard with dash (22); HP Cloud Services (21) and HP Cloud (7), Hewlett Packard Co. (4). Seriously, HP, what’s up with that?

Red Hat is on with 74, IBM with 72 and the list goes on. What I’ll be looking for, however will be real, live OpenStack customers which are starting to trickle out. OpenStack Foundation member Cloudscaling (which registered 14 summit attendees) just announced video game publisher Ubisoft as a customer and already has claimed LivingSocial and IBS Datafort as reference accounts.

Structure 2011: Werner Vogels – CTO, Amazon.com

Some other interesting tidbits from the OpenStack Summit attendee list: Controversial foundation member VMware registered a whopping 4 22 people. VMware bought Nicira, a big OpenStack player in software-defined networking. And non-member Oracle registered 14 people. Interesting. Oracle is going its own way with cloud but recently buy bought Nimbula, an OpenStack member.

The new OpenStack Grizzly release will be front-and-center in Portland.

Amazon to tout OpsWorks, other enterprise-class services

Meanwhile, on the other coast, AWS CTO Werner Vogels will probably talk up AWS’ value to the enterprise and tout its new-and-improved cloud management features and services including OpsWorks lifecycle management offering and RedShift, Amazon’s inexpensive data warehouse alternative to Teradata, Oracle, IBM and HP products.

AWS, a favorite among developers at startups and big companies alike, still needs to persuade  financial services companies and organizations in other heavily regulated industries that its public cloud infrastructure can be trusted for sensitive workloads — things beyond archival storage. And, there are indications — including the private cloud it’s allegedly building for the CIA that it’s getting over its aversion to private cloud deployment as well.

OpenStack clouds are starting to gel — at least at some customer accounts. What remains to be seen is which of the many OpenStack cloud providers will gain traction. And meanwhile, AWS continues to chug along.

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The goal of Project Moonshot, as initially stated in November 2011 and reiterated seven months later, is to offer super energy-efficient and compact servers capable of running the world’s biggest webscale (and biggest enterprise) workloads at a fraction of the cost of current hardware. HP said it shipped a number of early versions for customer proofs-of-concept last year but today’s news represents broad availability of what HP execs called a “software-defined server designed for the data center.”

The new server puts 4,500 Proliant servers into one HP 1500 enclosure. Compared to traditional Proliant (DL-380) servers, this iteration uses 89 percent less energy, 80 percent less space and is 97 percent less complex than the former state of the art at 77 percent less cost.

It’s understandable, given HP’s huge server installed base in enterprises, why it lays out that particular comparison, but customers might be more interested in how Moonshot boxes compare with webscale servers from what used to be no-name rivals like Quanta, Inventec, and Wistron. Increasingly, those are the servers that are being forklifted into massive data centers.  The notion of BYO servers is also spreading. In January, Rackspace, the big hosting and cloud provider, for example, said it would start building its own servers.

That trend puts traditional server vendors like HP, Dell and IBM in a tough spot. It’s good to see HP willing to cannibalize its existing products — if it doesn’t someone else will eat its lunch anyway. But,the macro issue is whether most of those big web-scale workloads have already moved onto new “no-name” servers or plan to do so. It is clear that for many of these new companies, the name on the box is not as important as the box itself and very few webscale customers appear willing to pay a premium for a label.

Moonshot servers are based on underlying fabric from HP networking, said Mark Potter, VP and GM of HP’s industry standard server (ISS)group. “This SDN switching is OpenFlow enabled so you can rapidly connect these computer architectures to any network,” he said during Monday’s web event. HP  is now running both 32- and 64-bit ARM-based Moonshot servers in the lab, he added.

Facebook outlined its wish list for webscale enclosures and servers which it pushed into the Open Compute Foundation. HP is part of that effort but it was unclear to me whether Moonshot servers will be fully Open Compute Project (OCP) compatible.

Update: Jim Ganthier, VP of marketing and operations in HP’s server group, confirmed that Moonshot is not OCP compatible but said the new servers would be great for powering similar webscale workloads.  He also took exception to the notion that HP server marketshare is being eroded by white box makers. Existing HP servers “power 8 out of 10 of the world’s most visited web sites and 3 out of 4 of the biggest social media sites,” he said. In addition, he said research like that from Gartner and IDC that shows branded servers — including HP boxes — losing ground to white box ODMs came out “before the world knew about Project Moonshot.”

So we’ll have to wait and see.

This report was updated at 9:19 a.m. PST with more detail on the servers and again at 12:55 p.m. PST with additional HP comment.

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Some HP board members stuck to their guns in the face of shareholder discontent. Three weeks ago, Rajiv Gupta told Reuters: ”Losing some of our directors in an abrupt and disorderly manner could undermine our efforts to stabilize the company … What the company needs now is stability and consistency of leadership so that the Board and the management team can devote all of their focus and energy towards executing on our strategic plan.”

 So much for that. By now, it’s apparent that  some of those challenges resonated. Directors John H. Hammergren and G. Kennedy Thompson have decided to leave the board, leaving two slots open for HP to fill. Both directors will continue to serve until the May board meeting, according to the release. Many have blamed HP’s myriad troubles on its inept board, including the CtW Investment Group, an arm of labor federation Change to Win that filed a letter in February asking for Lane to be removed as chairman. The group blamed the retiring directors and Lane for the debacle that is the Autonomy purchase.

Cleaning house might be the first step to getting the company back on track after what has been a tumultuous couple of years since the company deposed Mark Hurd as CEO and Chairman in 2010 after a sexual harassment scandal. Lane’s tenure has been rocky to say the least. He came on as chairman at the same time as former SAP CEO Leo Apotheker was named CEO and presided over the company’s problematic — and extremely expensive — acquisition of Autonomy for more than $13 billion.

That acquisition — which was Apotheker’s baby but got board approval —  raised eyebrows even at the time it was announced with many observers calling Autonomy wildly over priced. That assessment turns out to have been true. HP subsequently wrote off  more than $8 billion of that purchase and pushed U.S. and U.K authorities to investigate alleged fraud on the part of former Autonomy management. The fact that the purchase passed muster in the first place though focused more eyes on HP’s board.

In a release announcing his move on Thursday Lane said:

“After reflecting on the stockholder vote last month, I’ve decided to step down as executive chairman to reduce any distraction from HP’s ongoing turnaround,” said Lane. “Since I joined HP’s board a little over two years ago, I’ve been committed to board evolution to ensure our turnaround and future success. I’m proud of the board we’ve built and the progress we’ve made to date in restoring the company. I will continue to serve HP as a director and help finish the job.”

The one question some shareholders may have is why Lane, who is a partner emeritus at VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Buyers,  remains involved at HP at all.

HPQ data by YCharts

This post was updated at 11:15 a.m. PST with director comment.

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