A year ago in Nice, the debate was whether “the cloud” was reality or hype. Economic virtues were touted and praised. Vendors and SPs alike were challenged to “think of everything as a service” – available on demand, self-service, with use-based pricing. But skeptics abounded.
Six months ago in Orlando, discussion swirled around active cloud experiments. Who was running them? Focused on what? -- More often than not, on dev/test. Talk rife about “rogue” experiments in departments, paid for with credit cards and using compute power from Amazon or Google -- outside control and often invisible to IT. Presentations focused on squeezing the costs and provisioning delays out of IT infrastructure and operations as a result of “just in time” capacity instead of “just in case” to handle peak loads. And a challenge from several large enterprise organizations, such as Commonwealth Bank of Australia, to develop reference architectures for cloud-based services. Hence the formation of a group, affiliated with the TM Forum, of enterprise customers, major suppliers and service providers to accelerate the adoption of cloud technologies for mutual benefit.
Nice 2010: Most skepticism has abated due to the relative flood of cloud services announcements from major suppliers. Cost advantages are no longer debated – but are assumed. Economic discussion has turned to using the cost savings resulting from virtualization and cloud-based services to driving innovation, much more rapid development and delivery of new products and services. Cloud-based services are presented as enabling – or perhaps forcing? -- a new operating business model for IT that breaks the internal monopoly and forces IT and business leaders to think and behave in new ways. Speculation focuses on large scale deployments and “bold moves” that will galvanize the market.
And, thankfully, food and wine as excellent as ever…..
Posted
05-21-2010 1:30 AM
by
Bill Ahlstrom