Amazon Web Services (AWS) is great, but many of our enterprise clients want those cloud services and values delivered on premise, behind their firewall, which may feel more comfortable for protecting their intellectual property (even if it isn't). AWS isn't very interested in providing an on-premise version of its solution (and I don't blame them). Today's partnership announcement with Eucalyptus Systems doesn't address this customer demand but does give some degree of assurance that your private cloud can be AWS compatible.

This partnership is a key value for organizations who have already seen significant adoption of AWS by their developers, as those empowered employees have established programmatic best practices for using these cloud services — procedures that call AWS' APIs directly. Getting them to switch to your private cloud (or use both) would mean a significant change for them. And winning over your developers to use your cloud is key to a successful private cloud strategy. It also could double your work to design and deploy cloud management solutions that span the two environments.