Settling the cloud hype confusion

• Tweet

• Tweet

Now and again I see posts where I think: ‘Yep – that’s a keeper.’ So it is with David Terrar’s piece: Is the Cloud term an asset, or just marketing hype?

The ongoing rumblings around the cloud’s technical definition have served to mask business value. Instead they’ve been used as a way vendors jockey for marketing position. As David says:

Of course the Cloud term gets caught up in marketing BS.  The industry and the average CIO needs to spend less time worrying about definitions and terminology and more about business benefits and use cases.  Sadly, we technology vendors and advisors have been prone to that problem for every evolution I’ve lived through over the last 30 years (and before).  I’ve fallen in to the trap many times too – 4 or 5 years back I was arguing about, 1 to many, “pureplay” Software as a Service solutions compared to webified client/server apps that were being hosted somewhere and accessed through a browser (and completely forgetting that my company motto is think Business, not Technology).  I better hang my head in shame.

Hooray – a vendor being honest. We need more of that. The good news is that proliferating media allows the rest of us to critically examine such statements and call them out as the occasion demands. Whereas in the past a vendor might strive to own a marketing one-liner, that is less likely to succeed today. Cloud computing is important. It is indicative of a technology change that, perhaps for the first time, offers business of all sizes an opportunity to get an equal stake in the value that tech can bring. It is the democratizing of technology with services like Amazon EC2 and Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE). Anyone can afford to participate and it is that which creates a truly competitive environment. Those that ‘get it’ will thrive, those that don’t less so.

David’s post mentions the Cloud Computing World Forum. A grand title to be sure but one that may yet live up to the name. Last week I was asked if I will moderate some panels at the upcoming event. I make conditions: Users, users users. We’ve heard the hype, we’ve seen the vendor slide decks. 2010 is the year when users speak. So yes, while I usually say I have a great face for radio, if CCWF can meet my T&E then I’ll be delighted to sit with users and ask the cloud clearing questions I hear but which rarely get answered to any real satisfaction. User representation on the platforms at CCWF is high so I expect some genuine nuggets to emerge from the discussions.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Three Best Ways to Reduce Tech Costs (online.wsj.com)
• Forrester: 2010 Software Spending Devoted To Existing Systems More Than Emerging Technologies (eon.businesswire.com)
• Goldman Sachs: Shift toward cloud unstoppable (news.cnet.com)
• Is your business future proof? (billbennett.co.nz)

Tagged as: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, business models, business value, cloud applications, Cloud computing, cloud infrastructure, clouds, confusion, everything as a service, hype, hype cycle, marketing positions, settles, Software as a service, value, vendors