Marketing Cloud Computing, why Amazon and Google have the advantage

i have been resisting the cloud computing hype as I am sure many of you have, but I’ve started to look at Cloud Computing as an agent to change the behavior of IT to be greener in the data center.

There are skeptics to the hype.

Merrill Lynch: Cloud Computing Market Will Reach $160 Billion...Really?

Written by Alex Williams / November 25, 2009 11:40 AM / 8 Comments

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cloud-question-mark.jpgThe estimates for cloud computing can make you wonder sometimes about what to believe. Analyst firms and it looks like investment houses, can be notorious for wild estimates about market sizes.

So we have to wonder about the estimates from Merrill Lynch, which is estimating the cloud computing market to reach $160 billion by 2011.The estimate includes $95 billion in business and productivity applications.

Whoa! That makes cloud computing one of the fastest growing markets in the world.

But Merrill Lynch is not alone in its lofty estimates. Earlier this year, Gartner pegged the market at $150 billion by 2013.

In other words, cloud computing will be huge but to call it a $160 billion market seems like a form of hype that can lead to all kinds of issues. It's almost reminiscent of the dot-com bubble.

And look what happened there.

The same report discusses the business and and technical reasons of why Cloud Computing is good.

But then you need to look at the dynamics in play. IT is built on legacy systems, custom, built to order environments. Cloud computing provides a level of automation.

From the PriceWaterhouseCoopers summer Technology Forecast:

"Legacy IT soaks up much of the available IT budget and is a primary barrier to IT responsiveness and overall business agility."

The report goes on to say that cloud will be necesssary for automating the world of IT:

"...IT must adopt an architecture that creates loose coupling between the IT infrastructure and application workloads. It also must modernize and automate IT's own internal business processes for provisioning, managing, and orchestrating infrastructure resources."

With all this speculation it is hard to know what works in cloud computing.

Which is why I think Amazon and Google have the advantage.  They have the data that shows where there is the adoption of cloud computing.

Marketing the Cloud Computing covers an interesting point here.

May 12, 2009

Marketing Cloud Computing: Uncharted Territories

One of the aspects of cloud computing that receives too little attention is the massive change it brings to how software and IT infrastructure are marketed, sold, purchased and serviced. Through my work at GigaSpaces, and now advising start-ups and large companies with various cloud offerings, I have come to realize how much marketing cloud computing is still uncharted territory  -- and especially when it comes to the enterprise.

Many of the value propositions cloud brings to the table have been commonplace in the consumer Internet for more than a decade: self-service, ease-of-use, pay-by-the-drink pricing and so on. The same is true from the vendor's point-of-view: a low-touch, low-value, high-volume and short sales cycle. It's no surprise then that consumer-oriented companies, such as Amazon and Google, are the ones leading the charge in what is essentially a B2B market.