Time to Make It Rain!

“The Cloud” has given us far too many metaphors.  And most of us have overused them, peppering our discussions, presentations and blogs – all too often over-reaching for an apt image.

At TM Forum Management World, a new one arose.  Arguing that “it’s time to make it rain,” Deutsche Bank’s Sean Kelley, global asset management CIO and head of DB’s platform services,  asked assembled suppliers and providers to accelerate the “rain” – the results of the Cloud.  Keying off the American image of “rainmaker” – someone who makes things happen – Kelley forcefully argued in multiple presentations and discussions that the Cloud enables a totally different business model for IT and for IT-based services.

Kelley challenged the 3,000+ Management World participants to move beyond the obvious Cloud benefits of reduced costs through virtualization, consolidation, on-demand-access to just-in-time resources and utility billing.  He posed instead a world where those savings would allow substantial reinvestment in creating and delivering new services much faster and more easily than ever before.  He sketched some key attributes of the new Cloud operating model:

CapEx --> OpEx

Fixed Costs --> Variable Costs

Cost Allocation -->Cost Attribution

Stand-in-line Service --> Self-Service

Just-in-case capacity --> Just-in-time capacity

Months to deploy --> Minutes to deploy

One of the driving forces behind  and newly named chairman of the Forum’s Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council (see http://www.tmforum.org/TMForumPressReleases/TMForumsCloudServices/42285/article.html), Kelley argued that this new agility and flexibility will force IT organizations and leaders to abandon their  internal monopolies and enter a new world of competition driven by the easy availability of Cloud-based services which will allow their business-leader colleagues to choose among a broad range of suppliers.  But it will also enable the IT leaders themselves to refocus spending on innovation and to provide the agility that the business lines demand. 

Kelley’s ECLC colleagues, Nick Holdsworth and Jon Waldron of Commonwealth Bank of Australia,  are completing a draft version of a reference architecture for Database as a Service developed by CBA to accelerate their private Cloud implementation.  The draft, soon to be open for comment, also includes bills of materials for standardized hardware and software “platform servers” or PODs to support DBaaS.  The intent is to get vendors to pre-build standard SKUs based on these PODs and for Cloud-services providers to use them as well, thereby facilitating a competitive market.

At least a few “showers” were present in the multiple demonstration and prototype projects in the Forum’s Catalyst program .Whether the Defense Interest Group’s project  focused on rapid reliable services deployment in times of disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes, or other projects demonstrating how Cloud service brokers can lace IPTV services across multiple domains, or provide virtualized services ranging from desktops to applications to backup for small and medium businesses, or unified communications as a Cloud-based service, the projects clearly demonstrated that rain is on the way – and not too far over the horizon (see http://www.tmforum.org/Catalysts/8342/home.html ).  

In multiple presentations, hallway and other informal discussions, it is clear that a psychological shift of major significance is well along the way.  No longer is the discussion about how the Cloud can drive costs out of operations.  Cost reductions are a given.

The discussion now is focused on how the Cloud enables developing new services much more quickly as well as deploying them much more rapidly – following the “fix or fail quickly” learning model pioneered by Google and others. 

This is what Kelley, Eric Pulier and others of the ECLC are evangelizing:  Use the Cloud to develop and deploy new apps much more quickly than ever before.  And also use the Cloud as an appropriate place for capacity-constrained functions.

This leads to the concept of “right placing” of functions…….discussed next time.

And, by the way, I’ll try very hard to erase Cloud metaphors in future comments!