All aboard the Cloud Express.  Next Stop, Gold Country!

Ok, I'm a bit biased, I live in gold country (educational link for our global friends), and no, for this gold rush you won't need picks, pans, and shovels, but you will need an Internet connection and a browser, or as in this case, help support the sellers of the picks and shovels - The Cloud Service Providers.

With today's announcement of CA (NASDAQ: CA) and Amazon (NasdaqGS: AMZN) partnering to leverage and support Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) with CA's Enterprise IT Management (EITM) offering, we are witnessing the continued focus and support by mainstream, traditional IT companies, for this market segment; placing their proverbial stamp of approval on the promise of cloud computing. You can refer to the complete announcement details here.

This will provide great benefits for enterprise clients not only in terms of choice, flexibility and cost savings, as they seek to optimize their IT, but future dividends in the combination of innovative leading cloud service providers like Amazon, and experienced IT companies like CA.  Each stands to benefit through 2 key lessons - innovation (Amazon) and experience (CA), to the benefit of their joint enterprise clients

While I looked forward to meeting and speaking with Mr. Stephen Elliot, VP BU Strategy at CA, fate intervened at the last minute and we were unable to connect by phone, so below is an e.mail exchange with the CA team, but first, some background on Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) to put this in context with the announcement (for those less familiar with cloud computing). 

Amazon's EC2 is a reliable, web based service that provides pay per use, flexible, and scalable computing capacity, and it is one of several superb offerings within Amazon's Web Services (AWS).

RD: What target industries are you addressing with this offering?
CA: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is not reselling CA’s products as part of this announcement. CA and AWS are collaborating at a technical level to ensure broad integration and support between CA’s EITM solutions and AWS’ management technology to help our mutual customers take advantage of Amazon EC2 as a simple extension of their enterprise IT infrastructure.

In addition to development activities, CA is included in Amazon’s Partner program and the companies will be working together in enterprise environments to co-sell their respective solutions to enterprises who want comprehensive management capabilities that allow them to discover, monitor and provision their physical and virtualized resources as a unified set of integrated services.

RD: What is the ideal size enterprise for this offering?
CA: This offering is tailored to large enterprises, with at least 4,000 accounts.

RD: What is the CA business model for the internal (on premise) and external (off premise) enterprise service offerings?
CA: We are working with both customer segments and both have deployed our products to help manage services.  CA makes its money selling software, and works with customers to help them attain their key business objectives.  That said, many cloud providers have different operating models and CA is collaborating with these providers to accommodate their business models and goals.

Performance management and visibility, change and configuration management, and self service are key areas of value for customers. End-to-end visibility is critical—this is another value proposition CA offers.

RD: What capital and operational expense savings can be expected with this offering?
CA: Each customer has different needs and architectures. This is also impacted by process standardization (or lack thereof), and management solutions deployed. The net is that cost savings are key, but this is about service availability, from an end-to-end perspective.

RD: Is this an exclusive arrangement with Amazon EC2.
CA: No, this is not exclusive. Each cloud provider has their own unique business model, and as such can offer many different capabilities from security, service desk, performance management, etc.  Each cloud conversation differs depending on the need, and opportunity to differentiate.  This runs the gamut from business models to process integration, and go to market.

Don't miss the train - your competitors are already boarding.  Get your tickets to gold country now!