VMworld 2012: Shift in cloud use says Lufthansa Systems

A shift has taken place with companies running public, private and hybrid cloud.

So said Jorg Liebe, chief information officer of Lufthansa Systems, during a session at VMworld Europe 2012.

Headquartered in Kelsterbach, near Frankfurt am Main, Lufthansa Systems hosts a variety of applications for airlines and travel companies. Many of these multi tenant systems are business-critical, running booking engines and aircraft navigation systems.

For example, in February, German airline Eurowings chose Lufthansa Systems to provide datacentre operations and SAP application management and hosting. Eurowings uses around ten applications vital to its flight operations.

Liebe said: “The vCloud approach is somewhere in the middle of the private and the public. Instead of running the cloud of our datacentre in Germany, we can deploy near the airline customer and still maintain security and management.

“It’s about provisioning the datacentres to where the pilots are so they can grab their data from a datacentre that’s closer to them.”

Carl Eschenbach, chief operating officer and co-president of VMware, said: “Essentially you are providing a private cloud but don’t have datacentres all around the world, so can deploy a public cloud in a customer’s datacentre and access those services through VMware tools.”

Eschebach asked Liebe: “As technology is maturing rapidly and most companies can deploy a private, public or hybrid cloud now what about the major barrier here – culture change?”

Liebe replied: “Most think if my datacentre is virtualised and we can push it anywhere around the world then what am I doing as an administrator? However, there is still a lot of work to do around test and development so there is still a lot needed from the engineering side.”