The cloud cash cow: planning & implementation services

Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA) has announced the Cloud Strategic Planning Service to provide cloud know-how to companies of various sizes that want to implement a form of cloud computing.

The planning service will be provided through Sun’s consulting arm, Sun Professional Services. It will evaluate a customer for cloud-readiness, determine whether a public or private cloud is appropriate, and identify opportunities in the cloud in terms of the nature of the business, the corporate culture, and the existing IT environment.

via Sun Shows Off Vendor Support For Sun Cloud — Cloud Computing — InformationWeek.

What percentage of enterprise workloads are in the cloud today?  My swag is less than 1%.

Think about why the x86 virtualization services market is so big.  Because you’ve got less than 10% of workloads virtualized.  There are plenty of workloads out there that companies help figuring out where/how/when to virtualize.  We’ll never get to 100% virtualized but even if we hit 20% or 30%, there is still a huge services opportunity.

Going from 1% to even 5% or 10% is meaningful to the whole ecosystem of cloud services vendors, including the professional services guys who are going to help customers make the transition.  Since the cloud professional services ‘experts’ haven’t really been identified yet, I bet we’ll see alot of people hanging the cloud shingle and following the money.

Getting back to the post referenced here, this is an obvious move for Sun, and is bound to put a ton of juice into their services business.  Cloud consulting is going to be very high margin and high volume at the same time.

Buckle up, folks.

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