zation structure or IT functionality is
harder in larger companies. Often you
have a better chance of success if you
introduce something that provides new
value, perhaps by enabling a new type of
collaboration, rather than replacing or
modifying existing functionality. In this
way you can avoid the risk of encoun-
tering resistance resulting from com-
plexity or politics. In today’s tougher
economic times, you may also want to
make your proposal more compelling
by showing that operational TCO (total
cost of ownership) can be significantly
lowered when using a cloud.
oLsen: The assumption that it’s cen-
tral IT making decisions about other
technologies is wrong. Cloud comput-
ing has become successful not because
a whole bunch of central IT groups pro-
claimed that cloud computing is good.
Cloud computing has become popular
from grassroots acceptance, from IT
decisions made by small businesses,
new providers, or at the departmental
level. Cloud computing is coming into
IT only at the end of this. My company
does not sell to CIOs. We don’t even try.
cReeGeR: That’s fine, but there are
CIOs who will have to provide plans af-
ter their CEOs read that one can realize
massive savings with cloud computing.
BouRne: So who should pay attention
to cloud computing?

oLsen: I’m either a consumer of information technology needs: I need applications, I need storage; or I’m a producer: I’m somebody who’s going to provide a service. Both of those audiences need to know what they can build from and how they can sell what they have. To me, it’s not primarily about central IT. Central IT is an important constituent, but all these little system integrators, consultants, little ISVs, VARs—these are the folks who actually deploy computation on a broad scale to businesses and people. Any person who is in that space, either as a producer or a consumer of IT, needs to understand how to use cloud services.

BADRos: To me, the value proposition of cloud computing is so broad that the beauty of it is you can sell to almost anybody in the organization. Different aspects of the solution appeal to different sets of folks. Depending on whom I’m talking to, the story is different in order to let them see how it’s going to be better for them.

WeRneR VoGeLs

If you run your
services inside
the company,
privately, utilization
becomes an issue.
It amortizes your
costs over a number
of cycles. If you run
services outside,
on a public service,
it is no longer
an issue for you.

The individual who has been using consumer email and Google Calendar is excited about having the home experience at work and about the rich search capabilities and collaboration of Calendar. We see people using docs and spreadsheets to manage their wedding on the docs collaboration suite. Then when they are doing a similar type of project at work, they don’t understand why they are stuck in early 1990s-style thinking with a set of applications that don’t talk to one another. For that person, the collaboration story is the value proposition.

If an enlightened CIO comes to us and is wondering how this thing helps his organization, then cost of ownership, ease of scaling, and simplicity of starting new geographically distributed offices are really rich selling points.

To the CEO, it may be the fact that the IT department doesn’t need to be as large as it is. The CEO is often scratching his head asking why he is spending 20% of his people budget just so the rest of his people can get their email. So, it really depends on the audience to understand what the best value proposition is. The beauty of cloud computing is there is a story for everyone—it’s that compelling.

cReeGeR: Does cloud computing enable new types of functionality that were not feasible under more traditional IT architectures?

VoGeLs: In the past, I always thought that you could not build data warehouses out of general components. It’s highly specialized, and I thought being really fine-grained precluded you from doing scatter-gather of lots of data op- erations.It hink MapReduce (http://

labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce- osdi04.pdf) has shown us that brute force works, and while it’s not the most efficient approach, it allows you to get the job done in a very simple way.

A number of small companies now provide data warehousing as a service. The data movement is a little more inefficient than it used to be, but they’re getting access to much smarter, much easi-er-to-use computational components.

It turns out that we have many customers who do not need a data warehouse 24-hours-a-day. They need it two hours a week. In the worst case, they’re willing to spend a bit more on computational resources just to get these two