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Today, most sizable IT organizations have hundreds, if not thousands, of licenses for software tools that are critical for building and running the databases and applications that power their business. Managing these tools and their associated licenses, including deploying, provisioning and updating them, is time-consuming and incurs many hidden costs. There are also real productivity costs when IT professionals can’t readily access the tools they need at the right time. On the other hand, putting a bunch of tools on a server with no management, provisioning or usage tracking capabilities around them can come at an even higher cost. So then, where should IT professionals or anyone else responsible for setting up and managing a tools infrastructure look for answers? The latest phenomenon sweeping the IT landscape – cloud computing – may hold the most promise to overcome this issue.

The reduced complexity, lower costs and improved scalability afforded by enterprise clouds are growing in appeal to many IT organizations. What many people fail to realize is that cloud-derived advantages such as on-demand access, shared pools and rapid provisioning are not limited to running their databases and applications. These same benefits can also be extended to help reduce the costs and complexities of managing the myriad software tools often used to design, build and manage systems. By employing cloud principles to set up a private cloud infrastructure for tools – a tool cloud, if you will – complete with application virtualization capabilities, organizations can centrally provision and manage licenses across their enterprise. The emerging tool cloud approach can give IT groups within an enterprise instant access to many of the tools they need to solve critical tasks, both improving their productivity and reducing tooling costs by allowing software to be shared.

A Bird’s Eye View of Cloud Computing

While a tool cloud bears some similarities to cloud computing and is able to address the issues mentioned, it is important to note that it does not meet the common definition of cloud computing today. The National Institute of Standards and Technology defines cloud computing as a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

A few important characteristics of cloud computing carry through to the tool cloud concept:
    

• On-demand self-service: The user can automatically provision resources such as server time and network storage without human intervention.
• Broad network access: Capabilities are available through standard forms of network access using heterogeneous thick or thin clients.
• Rapid elasticity: Fast and automatic provisioning for scalability, often with the appearance of unlimited resources.
• Measured service: Metering capability based on type of service, such as storage, processing, bandwidth and user accounts, where usage can be monitored, controlled and reported on.
• Resource pooling: Location-independent computing resources are pooled or shared via a multitenant model where physical and virtual resources can be dynamically assigned.
• Virtualization: Cloud computing typically utilizes virtualization as a means for rapid computing resource creation and reallocation.

Clouds are also commonly described as having different service models. This means there are different cloud capabilities provided to users. The three most common service models implemented today are:

• Software as a service: This model is also known as Web applications. The application runs on a provider’s cloud infrastructure and is accessible through a Web browser. The user does not manage or control the underlying network, servers, storage or application features. Examples include Salesforce.com, Flickr, Gmail and Facebook.
• Platform as a service: The user has access to abstracted middleware infrastructure. The user can deploy their own created application in the cloud using the provider’s programming languages and tools. The user does not manage or control the underlying network, servers, storage or application features. Examples include Google Apps and Force.com.
• Infrastructure as a service: The user is able to provision on-demand CPU, storage, networks and other computing resources from a provider. They are able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The user does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure, but has control over operating systems, storage, deployed applications and possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls). Examples include Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and Akamai.

What is a Tool Cloud and How Does it Fit within Cloud Computing?

A tool cloud is an emerging model for delivering software tools to users within a company. It incorporates cloud characteristics, like on-demand self-service, rapid elasticity and virtualization. By design, a tool cloud brings many of the benefits of cloud computing to users of application development and database tools.

And, while strictly speaking, a tool cloud cannot be categorized into any one service model, it does draw on several elements from both the SaaS and IaaS models. It gives users a view into the cloud via a Web application that shows the tools available to them based on criteria such as user ID, role or access privileges. The user can then select the tools they would like to provision and run without having to worry about software installation or licensing issues.

Why Enterprises Would Want to Use a Tool Cloud

IT executives are struggling with the pressure to reduce tool acquisition and maintenance costs, standardize and simplify across projects, and reduce the number of vendors – or, simply put, reduce tool management costs and procurement complexity.

So how can a tool cloud help with these corporate directives, and what benefits can you expect to realize when adopting such a strategy for your organization?