During the industrial revolution, trains enabled expansion into the western regions of the continent.  Wherever a train station appeared, economic expansion flourished.  Local businesses (saloons, hotels, general stores) blossomed to support the increased flow of people and goods.  Populations grew with the availability of food and work provided by the rail.  Factories arose with a fresh supply of labor and an ability to easily receive raw materials and ship finished goods.  Siting a rail station alone created economic activity, but supported new business growth many times the impact of the rail operation alone (Corrick, J., 1998, “The Industrial Revolution”).

Fast forward to more current times, light rail operations are facilitating similar economic growth.  When a passenger station is positioned, far more than the economic activity associated with the design and construction of the rail station transit hub is realized.  Local businesses flourish such as coffee shops, newsstands, housing developments and all the services associated with an increased residential presence.  Given the economic advantages, tax incentives and other considerations are typically promoted to attract these hubs recognizing that villages appear and prosper growing the respective tax base (Gertler, P., 2009, “Trains and the City”, Forbes Magazine).

Today, industrial-age railway stops are replaced by information-age digital hubs where information is the cargo loaded/unloaded from the transportation system (Nelson, D., 2013, ebay).  Increased economic activity in locations where information hubs (data centers) are commissioned is similarly witnessed.  Spending promoted by the design and construction of data centers alone is substantial, but more impressive is an associated increase in business velocity supporting those data centers.  Massive Internet companies are attracted to the region to better serve a local population hungry for the amenities afforded by the largest public network in history (the transportation system for information).  Trades arise supporting the electrical, mechanical and information technology assets housed within data centers.  Businesses requiring low network latency associated with a proximity to Internet exchanges position themselves close to data centers as do telecommunication carriers.  As is the case for light rail transit hubs, governmental tax incentives and other considerations are considered to encourage the placement of data centers in their respective economic zones to bolster the existing tax base and drive prosperity for everyone.  History has proven it only makes sense.

The cloud market continues to evolve rapidly, with near daily announcements of new offerings, services, partnerships or pricing models. Embracing that evolution Verizon Terremark has recently invested in two open source cloud projects: the Xen Project and Cloudstack. In doing so, we are investing in technologies that allow us to bring high quality products to market, while also helping participate in the long term development of key components of the cloud service delivery platform. For Cloudstack, we are endorsing the project and actively participating in the community. With Xen, Verizon Terremark is making a monetary contribution to the development project and joining the Linux Foundation as an advisory board member. The Linux Foundation is the new home of the Xen project.

Verizon Terremark has long been supportive of open standards; however, now is the right time for us to get formally involved in the open-standard ecosystem. Our support and investment reflects our desire to see the cloud market mature quickly and provide businesses with cloud-based offerings that address specific needs like performance, cost and flexibility. From our perspective, investing in open source technologies at this stage of market development makes sense because it accelerates sharing, technology and ecosystem growth and reduces development and go-to-market costs. Here are some of the many benefits we see in supporting open standards:

• API, application and technology sharing – Open source virtualization platform capabilities and applications make it easier and faster to develop programs and reduce training and compliance costs for end users. Technology sharing leads to higher quality, more robust implementations.
• Ecosystem and market growth – Open standards allows developers to build rich systems of cooperating solutions which foster a market and encourage a higher level of adoption by businesses of all sizes as well as developers and consumers.
• Cost reductions – Standards lower the barrier to entry for new technology companies as well as service costs for established players. End users ultimately win with increased price competition and innovation.

Verizon Terremark chose to invest in Xen and Cloudstack because of our close relationship with Citrix. Citrix currently supports the Verizon Terremark portfolio of enterprise-class IT services. We believe our involvement with Xen and CloudStack will further the industry momentum around these technologies. While these are significant because they are our first active investments in open cloud projects, they will not be our last support of the open source movement.  We believe that in supporting open source projects we increase the overall market acceptance of these platforms thus providing additional quality, choice and value to our customers. If the cloud market is to mature at a pace and to the level we foresee, established companies like Verizon Terremark have to embrace open standards and encourage continued ecosystem development. That step for us begins today.

When I joined Sun Microsystems in 2002, Scott McNealy had a saying “The Network is the computer” which turned out to be an amazing view into the future.  A decade later, Cloud Computing is a reality, and key to the concept of Cloud Computing is networking – in fact, I would say the main tenant is: compute, storage, and services on the network. Unfortunately for Sun (now Oracle) and even companies like IBM, they don’t have a Network.

This is what I was thinking about when the recently announced partnership between AT&T and IBM to combine AT&T’s networking capabilities with IBM’s cloud offerings – “Look someone else gets the point that the combination of a core network and a cloud offering is a compelling proposition.” The centerpiece of this partnership is adding secure networking to the cloud through automation of the connectivity over AT&T’s network.  I am hugely supportive of anything that advances the adoption of Cloud Computing, and security is still one of the major inhibitors of adoption in the enterprise, so this announcement sounds pretty good.

However, securely connecting to a public cloud isn’t really a new concept.  In fact, Verizon and Terremark have been offering this for years.  About 50% of our enterprise customers take advantage of our private networking functions including MPLS and VPN services to connect to our cloud.  Add to that the dynamic capabilities of CloudSwitch for creating automatic secured links from the customers environments to the clouds, and you have a complete picture of existing technologies and of how enterprises are already securely connecting to the cloud.  Beyond the native capabilities of Verizon Terremark, there are vendors like Cisco, Citrix, Juniper, and F5, as well as a plethora of startups and small companies that provide many forms of “cloud bridging” that will securely connect a public cloud to the enterprise.

It’s great to see AT&T and IBM recognizing the importance of both networking and cloud services.  This is why Verizon Terremark made major moves to expand our data center, software development, security technologies and cloud capabilities over the last few years.  We believe that it is important to tightly integrate these capabilities to deliver the performance customers need to adopt cloud computing. But the catch is – this is best achieved by getting these services from a single company whose infrastructure and services are unified and have been enterprise grade from day one, compared to a partnership where the sum is only as good as its different parts.

With our global IP network, 4G LTE wireless network, nearly  50 data centers, and huge investments in security and software development, we are rapidly moving to the point where “The Network is the Computer”, and we really mean it.