As springtime rolls around, all sorts of interesting things start popping up that either delight us (green grass), frustrate us (weeds), congest us (pollen) or confuse us (daylight savings time). And a similar phenomenon appears to also be happening with "Cloud Management" start-ups.

In the early days, Cloud Computing either meant using SaaS applications or developer groups ("Shadow IT") that used one of the public IaaS services, such as AWS. SaaS had built-in management and those developer groups either used the basic AWS tools or built some things themselves. Most of these were paid for on a credit-card, so people didn't spend much time "managing" the services, as they were either focused on getting a work-related function done (eg. sales teams using Salesforce.com) or attempting to stay under the radar from IT budgets and controls.

Then Cloud usage started taking off as groups realized they could solve problems faster. But with that came new challenges:

• How do we keep track of all the online resources?
• How do we more easily provision applications and associated resources?
• Do we have a plan to keep the resources running if the Cloud has an issue? 
• Do we need to consider using multiple Cloud services?
• Why are there different performance characteristics as we move applications from Dev/Test to Production in the Cloud?
• Why did the credit card company just call us to say that we exceeded the monthly limit?

 Reality set in that managing IT resources isn't as simple as swiping a credit-card or signing up for an online service. So now what?

1. It's good to see that many of these services can work across multiple clouds - both public cloud and private clouds. This gives customers flexibility and consistency as they align the right services to the right resources. [see: Cloud Concierge]
2. Many of these are offer "as-a-service", with variable pricing models. So not only can customers determine which services work best for them, they can align their costs to the level of service required.
3. Many of these services aren't trying to create a monolithic Cloud Management system, similar to many of the legacy systems in Enterprises today. They may add functionality over time, but as of now they are fairly nimble and efficient.