On Premises "Cloud"?

Is this an oxymoron? Or has its time come?

At a recent Silver Lining Cloud Computing meeting, we were treated to a couple interesting presentations, one by SnapLogic, the other by Tamale Software.

While SnapLogic offers technology to link private and public clouds/public SaaS offerings like SalesForce.com, Tamale offers an on premises appliance that they manage from their data center. Specifically tooled for their customers (securities analysts and portfolio managers), while it raises some cloud-oriented questions particularly around about scalability and handling spikes, it certainly helps alleviates concerns about security. Security is maybe the big issue for cloud computing, ensuring data privacy. I believe the economic drivers will still push many organizations to public cloud providers, but this "on premises" deployment model could be a good transitional state for some organizations and maybe even an end state for others.

In addition to cost-effective scalability, updateability is also an issue for on premise and on premise/cloud hybrids. To this end, Tamale has developed some interesting deployment technology called Delta. Not sure if this is code name or product name, but it essentially simplifies and automates the deployment of new components from their centralized data center to the customer's premises.

Definitely worth watching and looking into with more detail - addresses a big obstacle to the path to the cloud.