How's your holiday shopping going? Finding everything on your list?

Sorry-shouldn't have asked.

I know the answer. Any other time of year, you can skip out the door on a whim, head to the mall, and see what treasures you happen to run across. No pressure. No obligations. No fear. You pick up an item for yourself in one place, spot the perfect gift for your 9-year-old in another. It's all harmonious and easy and good.

But holiday shopping is different. Suddenly lists are involved. And pressure. Because failure to deliver on the specific items in these lists will not be met with gracious understanding. In fact, it may very well be met with tears. You don't want tears.

So you trudge out clutching your list and embark upon what will surely be an epic search for Hatchimals (gratitude is in order if you have no idea what those are), the new Nintendo set, the Nerf Remote Control Drone Blaster, or whatever it is that has been scrawled onto that very well thought-out list of desperately yearned-for items.

Sounds a lot to me like shopping for private cloud.

Your company leadership knows what they want (to save money and gain a competitive advantage), your developers know what they want (quick and easy access to compute resources), and you know what you want (for whatever you choose to succeed gloriously so you will continue to enjoy all the benefits of full-time employment).

So you've got your list. And if you've read the analyst reports, you know it's going to be very difficult to make all the contributing authors to that list happy. Private cloud is challenging. And done incorrectly it can be a time-consuming, costly endeavor.

But that doesn't mean it can't be done. Make no mistake, private cloud is being done very well by some companies. And being leveraged very effectively by the customers of those companies.

So where do you shop? Which private cloud solution will check all the boxes on the list and have your constituents dancing merrily around the data center after it's been deployed?

I suggest you look intoCisco Metacloud.

It's a fully-managed, on-premises, OpenStack-based private cloud. We build it, we deploy it, and we remotely operate it 24