I am of often surprised by how much interest Intelligent Automation for Cloud receives from Service Providers and enterprises that are building ITaaS.  I come across another individual who fits the mantle ofCloud Hero, someone who really stands out in their drive and passion to transform their organization and achieve apragmatic cloudfor their stakeholders.  Enterprises have choices to either build their own private cloud their way (which many are doing) but they can also choose to leverage a service provider as well.   There is a broad ecosystem of players in this space from of course Amazon, Rackspace, to traditional Telco's to more focused and nimble smaller cloud service providers.  How you as a service provider (or a cloud architect at your enterprise) think about and drive your organization toward the right choices for your cloud is absolutely critical the adoption, revenue, and ease in operational excellence.

Do you compete at the low end -what some call a commodity cloud?  Do you go after complete multi-tenancy based upon Cisco Network architectures and compete on functionality?  Do you think through how you are going to sell services and what your value proposition will be?  Are there creative angles that you can enable with your Cloud Orchestration framework?  Which of your internal systems do you really need to integrate with?  All are great questions.   Producing a revenue generating (or charged back private cloud) requires the attention to a multitude of details.  Organizations need an energetic individual who speaks their mind and can lead an organization the right balance of business, technology, and ultimately success inmonetizing the cloud.

This cloud hero isKarl Marsh,Staff Manager, Tools & Orchestration at Windstream Hosted Solutions, http://www.windstreambusiness.com/

Previous Superheros:

Superhero 3: Ravi Rajamani and Brian Krug of Cisco Advanced Services.

Superhero 2: Johan Milbrinkof Presideo Networked Solutions

Superhero 1: Ryan Carricoof Paypal