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