blog Over at his blog Cloud81, Altium chief information officer Alan Perkins is ruminating — as is often his wont — on cloud computing. According to Perkins, cloud computing vendors aren’t necessarily doing a fantastic job right now of telling the story of their products:
“Cloud providers know how cool their technology and various systems are, but they have difficulty in conveying what is possible to the business community in a way that the business community can really understand what it means to them beyond saving a few dollars. The business community ends up focussing on factors like Capex vs Opex, TCO, security, disaster recovery etc – factors that simply provide a framework for decision making around alternatives for doing exactly the same stuff they have always done. In this light the focus of the cloud is heavily on cost management and other secondary (albeit important) issues.”
I couldn’t agree more with Perkins. The term ‘cloud’ is so incredibly, ridiculously, overused right now that it’s getting really hard to work out where in the spectrum of services under this fat umbrella that most sit. The reality is that nothing has really changed — we’re still just talking about technological solutions to business, organisational or even personal problems. It’s the problem — each, individual problem — which should be focused on — not the definition of the solution.
Image credit: Katarzyna Lipińska, royalty free