The Year of the Cloud

Welcome to the year of the cloud.  I'm not one much on predictions, and I don't even think this counts as a prediction.  2011 will be the year when cloud computing really breaks loose.  The momentum is there.  New apps are coming on stream all the time.

As we compiled the initial lists for our new site - "Tools For Your Business" (toolsforyourbusiness.ca) it really struck me that there is a huge and growing supply of quality, web based applications out there that are "ready for prime time".   I'm consistently amazed at how many are free.   The price competition has ensured that they will be bargains.  Software as a Service (SaaS) is here.

In the mobile world - which I view as just an extension of the cloud, made popular by the iPhone --  "there's an app for that".  Well there is an app, a service for just about everything.  Heck, even the graphic for this blog is an SaaS app called Wordle.  It generates word clouds.  Like they say, there's an app/service for everything.

For all of us in IT, from vendors to in house staff, this is going to mean some real challenges and some real shakeups.  We've long known as IT suppliers that the money isn't in commodity applications -- if it ever was.  Commodity applications have done what all commodities do.  They've plummeted in price in the face of global competition.  And if commodity applications are plunging in price, can commodity IT services be far behind?

The real money will go to those who help companies create value.  We've been banging that drum for years, and I think 2011 is the year that it finally comes true.

We wish you all the best in this New Year.  It's going to be an adventure.   The year of the cloud.

The Cloud Computing Manifesto

This might date me - but one of my favourite movies is flick called "Network".  It features a psychotic newscaster who leads a revolution of TV viewers who charge to their window screaming, "We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore!"

I must have a soft spot for that type of sentiment.  Because one of my favourite books is the Cluetrain Manifesto.  I love the line - "We are not eyeballs, or clicks, we are human beings -- live with it!"

About bloody time, is what I've said.  And apparently so have a lot of others.  Today's customer isn't going to take it anymore.  Anyone with a business knows that.  All those predictions in the original Cluetrain Manifesto have come true.  In today's world, if you aren't better, faster, cheaper --- your customer is gone in a click.

For the longest time, IT has been exempt from that.  If you had an IT provider you'd bitch and whine, but it was what author Don Tapscott called the Hotel California syndrome.  (For those who are too young to remember the Eagles, the quote comes from a line in their song Hotel California which goes - "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!" )

Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle -- it didn't matter which monolith we talked about.  You didn't own them -- they owned you.  You had such an investment in them that you had to stay.  Even if you outsourced, you never left them that far behind.  Either they supplied the outsourcer -- or they were the outsourcer.

Well, those days are done.