TRAC Research recently had the chance to discuss some of the key trends in the cloud management market with Dave Asprey, Entrepreneur in Residence at Trinity Ventures. Dave is one of the leading experts in cloud management, application delivery and performance management and in the past has held executive positions at Citrix, Blue Coat, Zeus Technologies and Speedera Networks. Some of the key topics covered during this podcast include: market opportunities for deploying usage-based pricing for IT management solutions, key challenges for managing cloud performance and the impact that the emergence of cloud computing is having on load balancing and WAN optimization solutions.

Here are some of the key insights from the podcast:

"If you are a public IT management company and you switch to usage-based pricing, you'll probably have a hard couple of quarters. So for public companies this is a hard pill to swallow, but for private companies the challenge is that this is a very disruptive technology. You either have to make this business model from the start or have to make pretty radical changes to your existing model."

"I am not a big believer in cloud bursting, at least not with the way the technology is today. What is going to happen is that enterprises may have some applications that might be cheaper to just toss on the cloud. Same companies are going to say: "These applications are going to be in the cloud for the next couple of months". Well, 2 years later that becomes a significant application to the company. And that's how all other disruptive technologies like networking, PCs and mobile devices entered the enterprise."

"If you really architected something to run on hardware, it is pretty hard to port it to the cloud or to port it to a virtual appliance. And if you do that, the odds of it being highly performing go down substantially. However, if you start with software architecture and keep in mind that it can run on pretty much any hardware, this becomes something that is relatively easy to do."

"As you move more strategic applications to the cloud, application performance management pieces will become critically important, especially for paid applications. Another application management technology that will become critically important in the cloud is something that I would call "n+1 scaling". Hardware vendors have historically put 2 devices next to each other, and they would just have the "heartbeat" between the two. However, a few vendors out there architected solutions where they can just keep adding more boxes. When you are selling virtual appliances to cloud providers, it is very important that providers can deploy any number of virtual appliances and have them all running as a part of a single pool or as a subset of many different pools. Most virtual appliances today are not up to that "n+1" pooling task."

Click here to listen to the podcast