Thursday 18 October 2012

Comment to Cloudwashing-post on GigaOM

Commented the interesting post 'Why cloudwashing is evil, or at least annoying and potentially harmful' by Barb Darrow (@gigabarb) on GigaOM. The post is a summary of Tony Lucas, Flexiant, session on GigaOm's event Structure Europe.

Short break out:

"These companies say they’re standing pat because customers aren’t asking for cloud. That’s short-sighted, in his view. “They should be focusing on what’ s coming instead of what’s happening now.” The implication being that if they don’t, it will soon be too late." 
My comment:
"I hope you had a lot of hosting and service providers in the room listen to this. 
For customers my point is that cloudwashing really doesn’t matter, if you know what you’re doing (by own knowledge or by trusted advisor knowledge). It might be a problem if you get locked in using old techniques. It’s not bad for the cloud market either. It’s, as Lucas say, bad for the service provider. The problem is the lack of innovation, development and strategy vs proudness of a, maybe, working service. There’s no point in the “cloud-add” on a non-cloud service. If it works well as an i.e. traditional SaaS call it SaaS – be proud of it. If it isn’t NIST cloud compatible don’t call it cloud. Lucas is taking some sort of mentor/big brother role in this but it’s important service providers start looking one step further and set up a good strategy to better meet future behaviors customer needs. Call things for what it is, if the thing is out of date or soon will be; start thinking “what to do”. SP’s will 1st; start losing control and 2nd; losing customers and soon be out of business if they don’t plan well enough. You don’t have to be a CSP but you have to know how your services can work with cloud services, techniques and tools. 
On Newvem and my blog InMaxmind I’ve posted a couple of posts about cloudwashing and lock in’s. Feel free to browse them or contact me on twitter."
Additional resources ref to by me:

Cloud Washing – Don’t End Up Washing Your IT with False Clouds on newvem.com
The Devastating Cloud Lock-in on newvem.com
The Successful Cloud Lock-in! on newvem.com
Cloudwashing... does it really matter on inmaxmind.com


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