Last week at CCE-2011 in Santa Clara, we witnessed a proliferation of several mature cloud management offerings from some well-known and pedigreed providers. What each have in common is an ‘A-List’ team of founding cloud leaders and well defined services designed to corner a juicy segment of the market. I interviewed a good handful of their execs and came away with the observation that cloud management is a big game. You need a fair amount of expertise in your organization to wrangle the cloud but these solutions make that far easier and much more reliable for I.T. professionals to manage.  Self-service is a keyword for these offerings and SaaS is the modus-operandi of each.

Watch my interview of Randy Bias  of Cloudscaling to get yourself oriented to the big ideas and trends drawing the landscape for the future.

Manage It

In my discussion with RightScale CEO, Michael Crendell, listen to his assertion that partners are key to delivering a well-rounded offering and that a clear and concise user-experience with cloud management tools makes all the difference.

When it comes to IaaS, Abiquo has an inside track. CEO, Pete Malcolm talks about enterprise-class management features with a focus on managed service provider offerings. The Abiquo suite offers user-friendly control of billing engines, rich APIs for integration with existing systems as well as self-branding capabilities for corporate users.

Nimbula has a history. And what a history it was: The creators of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Chris Pinkham, CEO and Co-Founder Willem Van Biljon now run Nimbula. Whether you are running on a private, hybrid or public cloud, they recognize that you need a secure and robust management suite in order to succeed. Nimbula solutions focus on identity and permission management, automation and robust auditing to help customers maximize their investment in cloud computing.

Monitor It

A key part of managing your cloud infrastructure is the ability to monitor service levels which translate to customer experience. At the end of the day, if the customer is not having a good experience, the service-provider company’s bottom line will eventually suffer. Ensuring that everything is performing well at all times will alleviate the need for strict SLA’s that in themselves tend to be problematic with SaaS services. There were several adroit players present at CCE-2011.

NewRelic offers lucid eye-candy for monitoring applications. This is called: Application Performance Monitoring or APM. What sets them apart is the scope of their probe facilities plus the analysis of the data resulting in flexible but solid visualization. Once you see these dashboards you will get it right away. Chris Cook, President and COO of NewRelic met me a week before the show to lay the foundation and VP of Business Development, Bill Lapcevic announced  the company’s new’server monitoring’ at the show in the two interviews on The Cloudist TV.

CiRBA’s Andrew Hillier points out that excess capacity is the bane of cloud installations and that managing that requires some very good monitoring, analysis and automation. In The Cloudist TV interview at CCE-2011, Andrew introduces the concept of the ‘Brain’ which makes deductions about deployment and retiring of under or non-used resources. Fascinating, but don’t take my word for it, watch this animation on their site.