Published via F: 2013-04-18 23:16:41
It's official: the cloud is boring. While some of you already felt like cloud was BOA (boring on arrival), the reality is that it's been causing all sorts of headaches within the enterprise. Until now.
As Forrester analyst James Staten suggests,
new product announcements from both OpenStack and Microsoft Azure got a muted yawn this past week, which is a Very Good Thing, as he explains:
"[H]o-hum releases like these are signs of maturity that signal to enterprises that it’s now okay to invest. Let’s face it. Most enterprises are conservative. We don’t like to be first with any new, risky technology. That’s why we wait for the 2.1 release before trying something new... We’d like other companies to work all the kinks out of the system, live through all the stability issues and fix all the bugs so we can get a solid release to work with."
My Two Cents
According to this article, the latest sign that enterprise is about to "adopt" cloud is that cloud is now boring. I love it and I hate it. The premise is that since it's boring, therefore it's ok to embrace it and for the enterprise to buy its services. Make no mistake about it, we should take whatever bones get thrown the cloud's way, but this is not the way I envisioned success. Boring is better. Maybe Maturity is the word I am looking for, but boring will do. As long as with all that is boring brings SALES to customers!
I also believe that by generically referring to these type of Distributed IT Services (known as cloud), it does actually impede adoption. Nobody just buys cloud. What they buy is a specific solution to a problem or pain! So what are the drivers for somebody buying cloud services? Maybe it's the lag time of ordering and actually receiving servers? Does it really take 6 -8 weeks to get a decent server. Many times YES! Maybe it's getting better bandwidth pricing? If you are a mid-market company or smaller, then the answer is likely YES! Maybe it's having a better architect-ed solution? With greater fault-tolerance, DR, elasticity or scalability. All are very likely. Maybe it's the load balancers? Using the name CLOUD is a good starting point. Every good movement needs a name, but after the introductions, then the devil is in the detail. Specific solutions to problems or pain points. And that's now a boring term called Cloud!
