When I go and talk to customers and partners about cloud computing and more specifically private clouds, executives always want to know where private clouds fit in their IT landscape. Here at TIBCO we believe that private clouds are a delivery model for enterprise IT, where scalable and elastic infrastructure, platforms and applications are delivered as services to internal customers.

That definition seems simple enough, but the same questions always arise, isn’t that the same thing as virtualization, or is private cloud just a fancy word for virtualization? These questions are not a surprise, most enterprise IT organizations we work with have spent the past few years working with virtualization software and they want to understand how a private cloud intersects or enhances that investment.

In working with many enterprise customers we have found that there are three core capabilities that management software you run your private cloud on should provide:

1. Infrastructure Management: the ability to define a shared pool (or pools) of infrastructure from physical resources, virtual resources or infrastructure resources you source from a public cloud provider

Noted industry analyst (and friend) James Staten from Forrester said it perfectly in a recent web cast (excerpts posted on PrivateCloud.com) - It’s not as easy as setting up a VMware environment and thinking you’re done… Virtualization is a good step on the way, but isn’t the whole enchilada.

2. Application Management: the ability to encapsulate and migrate existing enterprise applications and platforms so that your applications become more elastic. The private cloud management software must enable your existing software applications to scale (and shrink) based on demand and usage

Matt Prigge from InfoWorld captured this perfectly in an interesting blog post called – Finding a Home for Private Cloud So here’s how the private cloud is different: It’s built to mimic the functionality of a public, multitenant cloud rather than simply automating a collection of privately managed server resources. This difference is subtle, yet very important.

3. Operations Management: if you want to deliver a service to the enterprise, then you need to give you’re users a simple way to access the service. If you want to see how this works, take a look at the self-service operations management demo

If you put all three of these capabilities together - infrastructure, applications and operations management – then you have the capability to deliver scalable and elastic infrastructure, platforms and applications as services to your internal customers.

And that is a heck of a lot more valuable to your organization than just virtualization.

For more information on how to run your private cloud on TIBCO Silver - check out the “run” page of the Silver site.