Every once in a while I get a break and have some time to review the comments people make on my semi-annual surveys. The quantitative results can be tabulated pretty quickly but I have to grab a minute here and there to see what people have added as clarifying/expanding remarks, and it’s usually worth the effort. This week I’ve been looking at the enterprise vision of cloud computing.
Enterprises tell me that the cloud is a still-a-bit-fuzzy evolution of the virtualization trend. Virtualization, they say, was a way for them to apply multi-programming principles to applications that were designed to run not as tasks or threads but on dedicated hardware. They were able to cut costs by consolidating servers. IaaS is seen by most enterprises as essentially a hosted form of virtualization. They found that there were some applications with utilization low enough and data volumes light enough that the pricing model for public cloud services made sense. Add these situations to the combination of pilot/development use and you get the current cloud market. You can see that these all represent “special circumstances”, and that this kind of cloud usage is not and won’t be a threat to internal IT or current practices.
The next step, says enterprises, is to apply public cloud services to another special circumstance, the workload portability applications. There’s something to be gained in some businesses by sizing internal IT for something less than peak loads, then letting work flow out to a public provider. It’s even better if you’re accommodating an internal failure by overflowing onto public resources. Nearly all enterprises have looked at this, but in nearly 80% of cases they find that the data access costs are prohibitive. Sure they can build a cloud configuration that has the attributes they need, but they end up buying servers in someone else’s data center and not using cloud computing. This is why companies like IBM and Oracle have promoted packaged configurations; two-thirds of enterprises say that using one of these data-center-in-a-box configurations is cheaper than using public cloud services to support workload portability. In all, this new cloud application source isn’t exploding the opportunity space either.
What companies are looking at most, or maybe I should say “looking for most”, is a new paradigm for cloud applications. For the last decade, enterprises have looked at componentized applications to enhance productivity by tuning application data screens and functionality to classes of users rather than having one data presentation model for all. With the advent of mobile broadband, these businesses now see “point-of-activity empowerment” as a source of productivity gains. That means pushing information and even collaboration right to where the worker is, in the exact context that’s needed. One of my survey enterprises likened it to having a worker’s second-tier support team virtually at hand when needed. This, enterprises say, could be a major benefit.
What’s not clear is how critical “the cloud” is in realizing it. PofA empowerment is an application integration issue, and you can solve it with SOA components or RESTful interfaces and something to scrape API data into a flexible presentation format. In effect, every current application a business runs that presents results via an API is a SaaS private cloud service. Private clouds in the sense most mean it, meaning implementations of IaaS or PaaS using the same software tools as a public provider would use, are proving harder to justify as a step up from virtualization.
If you look at how the cloud might change IT spending by enterprises, or drive massive service deployments on the provider side, you have to look beyond nickel-and-dime impacts from the applications we’re running in the cloud today. Enterprises think it will have something to do with creating agile deployment platforms for point-of-activity apps, simply because if it doesn’t they don’t know where the benefits to drive massive cloud adoption would come from.
What this means, of course, is that we’re not doing a very good job of preparing cloud technology for a commercial future. I think HP and IBM and Oracle are all trying to do that, but their attempts are contaminated by two factors—a drive for short-term results and the lack of media focus on relevant issues. My model says that point-of-activity empowerment for businesses could drive cloud revenues up so sharply that the current market would be a pebble on the beach by comparison, but that’s modeling the opportunity based on the productivity benefits. We still need to figure out how to reap those rewards. Likely the solution will come from the convergence of various as-a-service trends, SOA, application integration, web apps and APIs…a host of things. Users themselves will assemble the goods at some point—maybe 2016 or so. Or we could present them with the package now and accelerate the industry’s profit deposits considerably. Seems a logical choice to me.