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04.01.10 The Cloud Will Test The Survivability Of Hardware And Software Firms  By Mike KavisRandy Bias wrote a good post today discussing which vendors are leading the cloud race. I totally agree with his assessment that pure play cloud service providers are leading the way with more innovation and speed to market for new features. In contrast, traditional hosting companies moving into cloud computing are hobbled by running two teams: development and operations. Expect the gap to widen as more hosting companies continue to misunderstand that this race isn't about technology; it's about people, software, and discipline.  I think these results are driven by the reason why these vendors are in the cloud to begin with. The thought leaders like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce are early pioneers in this space and have built sustainable business models for offering cloud services to enterprises. The pretenders, also known as hardware and software vendors, are running to the cloud because they see a future where it no longer makes sense for enterprises to spend huge sums of money on infrastructure and packaged on-premise software. Unfortunately for the pretenders, their organizations are not built to compete in the world of cloud computing. It's the man behind the curtain syndrome for the pretenders.So these vendors hit the road and attend conference after conference filling up panels and keynotes with their own cloud "experts". Meanwhile, while the pretenders continue to rebrand their existing offerings as cloud-ware, the innovators just continue to deliver more robust APIs, expand data centers to other parts of the world, and lower prices. Can the pretenders make it? Some will, some won't. I believe that the software vendors have a legitimate chance to compete in the SaaS and PaaS markets, especially Microsoft. The biggest challenge for the software vendors is how to price their services so they can bring in the same revenue streams that they are used to in the on-premise world. It will be a greater challenge for the hardware vendors. Their strategy seems to be to convince enterprises to build their own private clouds, something I strongly oppose with few exceptions. The following image represents my view of what you really get when you build your own cloud in your data center. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Mike Kavis is a veteran Chief Architect with over 23 years of IT experience including distributed computing, SOA, BPM, data warehouse, business intelligence, and enterprise architecture. Read Mike's blog at Enterprise Initiatives. |
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