Xerox, which has built a private cloud in India based on Microsoft's technologies, also controls the resources users can access. Because several different groups use the cloud, Xerox also uses Microsoft tools for internal billing and chargeback, says Raman Padmanabhan, senior vice president and CIO of Xerox Business Services.
Nokia Research, NSN and Xerox are outside the norm. While some businesses buy private cloud products but don't turn on critical features because they aren't quite ready yet, most avoid self-service for a reason.
"Typically, it's a lack of trust," says Lauren Nelson, an analyst with Forrester Research. IT managers worry that if they turn on cloud capabilities, like self-service, internal users will do things incorrectly, she says.
In many cases, though, it's just a matter of time, says Mike Adams, group product marketing manager at VMware. "In the enterprise, you may be dealing with a more conservative crowd that may turn [features] on over a longer period of time," he says.
Also, some IT admins figure that the upgraded products, even without self-service and some of the other capabilities, are good enough. Where it used to take them two weeks to provision resources, the new management interface lets them respond to a ticket request in two days.
"They don't think users need 15 minutes," Nelson says. "They think two days is substantially better than the status quo."
But that avoidance might come back to haunt IT: Given that developers know that they can spin up an Amazon Web Services instance in 15 minutes, IT may be essentially driving them to do so, even if it's against company policy.
Choices, choices
Deciding which private-cloud toolkit to use can be a long and complicated journey.
At Nokia Research, Bederov upgraded his data center to VMware-based tools and managed to reduce the time it took to provision new resources to 24 hours. "That worked for a while. But we began thinking we could do things faster and decided to look at ways to automate, either using VMware provisioning or doing something different," he says.
He looked at Cloud.com's CloudStack software -- now an open source project -- Eucalyptus and OpenNebula. He chose CloudStack for the control it offered. "You could see your VM booting and if you had something like a low-level kernel problem, you could fix it yourself," he says.
OpenStack didn't exist at the time and VMware's tools didn't yet enable the provisioning times the current generation does.
The fact that CloudStack is open source was also a deciding factor. "It was cheaper and the fact that it was open source allowed us to do things that we really couldn't dream about with something like VMware," Bederov says.
He also likes that CloudStack is hypervisor agnostic. Nokia Research is using the free version of Citrix's Xen hypervisor. But, because the group also bought its CloudStack distribution from Citrix, it gets support for the hypervisor.