Comments on: Justifying the cloud

By: Slow adoption of Linked Data: why? « GrowthTimes

Slow adoption of Linked Data: why? « GrowthTimes — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 19:05:48 +0000

[...] Justifying the cloud (accmanpro.com) [...]

By: Growth Times » Discussing the Semantic Portals of Eqentia, DBPedia and the Utility of Linked Data

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 22:40:06 +0000

[...] Justifying the cloud (accmanpro.com) [...]

By: Dennis Howlett

Dennis Howlett — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:49:36 +0000

I'm glad you brought up the 3 aaS layer argument because in recent times there's been a lot of conflating around saas/on-demand/cloud (hence my saying SOC somewhat tongue in cheek.)

I'd be interested in seeing your rational for IaaS because all the metrics I'm seeing say bunker style data centers don't catch up anytime soon without significant re-engineering.

As regards IDC – that sounds a bit like my 'double dipping' comment the other day (lol) but again, I'd like to see their numbers.

By: Nara

Nara — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:42:49 +0000

I think there are some fundamental misunderstandings out there about the cloud and why it's cheaper or better.

If you talk about IaaS, I can see how as datacenters reach scale and are appropriately virtualized that the economic advantages start to reduce or go away. However, there's still the benefit of almost instant provisioning of new compute resources which can make a huge difference in terms of time to market or the ability to do things that couldn't have been done before.

At the PaaS layer, the benefit is much faster development time, scalability without significant incremental cost and lower overall TCO.

At the SaaS layer, we can argue about TCO but there's no argument about initial costs being lot lower and typical much higher user adoption.

We'll see how the arguments pan out over time but it's weird to have IDC make statements like the one above at the same time that another part of IDC does research showing that development on the Force.com platform is 5x faster and less than 1/2 the cost of traditional apps.

By: alastair

alastair — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:07:31 +0000

The amazon case is interesting in that it breaks one of the "rules". Are they competing on cost or are they differentiating? I think it is the latter – the rule is you compete on one or the other – never both. You have had conversations on here about how accountants muddle cost and value. To my mind this is the same error.

By: Dennis Howlett

Dennis Howlett — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:34:58 +0000

It depends how you want to define 'economies.' I could for instance argue there is a value in collaboration, there is definitely a value in fast track implementation (think less consultants, less or more timely training, less messing around with processes building) so perhaps the better measure is not pure cost…in reality that's a movable feast but about value delivered.

I'm loathe to put calculations out there because every case is different and in any event the broad cases I have seen in the public domain are at best 'questionable' leading down all sorts of ratholes.

But to continue with broad strokes, fact remains Amazon can deliver storage (for example) at a fraction of what you'd pay an HP/IBM/Accenture and with better availability. That's just one element of many.

By: alastair

alastair — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:16:07 +0000

I'm interested in the evidence, but then I am a (particularly cynical) accountant – to my mind the only persuasive evidence is economies of scale. Perhaps the better message than its cheaper would be why its cheaper.

I guess that part of the cynicism in this argument is that its not about cost, its about what you have to pay the supplier.

"Expertise" or "Fast Track" is an argument that works in supply chain management, and arguably "cloud" is more complex so lends itself better to this sort of argument. But it only really works when you have either a track record or a particularly gullible target.