Just read an interesting article on Forbes.com by Dan Woods entitled “Parsing the Cloud“. Dan makes a similar argument to our own Ian Rae, suggesting that specialized clouds will be required to meet the privacy, regulatory, geographic latency and application architecture demands of cloud consumers.
This begs the question, who will build all these specialized clouds? Are there incumbents who simply need to evolve, or will we see the birth of dozens or hundreds of new cloud providers?
I have been talking to a lot of prospective cloud management start-ups lately, and a theme I am hearing repeatedly is that SMB is the great untapped opportunity. Most are hoping to be the RightScale for the SMB market by providing them with super simple web-based interfaces to clouds like EC2. What I’ve been telling them, is that unless they define SMB the way IBM does (when I was last working at IBM in 2005, eBay was classified as SMB), Cloud for SMB is a ship that has already sailed… Read More→
Cloudcamp San Francisco, the first in a series of events centered on cloud computing, took place on June 24. If the roughly 300 attendees at this informal industry meet-up are any indication, cloud computing is a popular and rapidly growing subject.
“Based on attendance at recent Amazon cloud conferences I was expecting maybe 100 people”, said CloudCamp instigator and Enomalism co-founder Reuven Cohen, “this is an amazing turnout after only 3 weeks of planning.”
I’m in San Francisco this week for Velocity, CloudCamp and Structure’08 and the valley buzz du’jour is definitely Cloud Computing. Tomorrow evening is the inaugural CloudCamp and I’m bracing myself for more argument over the rules of membership in the Clouderati.
It strikes me that for the business minded, the question is not who’s in and who’s out, rather, who’s going to be able to stay in. Cloud is simply an IT delivery model. It comes with high customer expectations that few companies are tooled up to meet. 24×7 availability, self-service provisioning, pay-per-use billing and internet scale, all for $1.78 a month.
I’m hoping for good debate about Cloud adopters, their expectations, and how we can implement Clouds to meet them… without going broke. See you there.
…cross posted to duncanhill.com
