Is the Alternate Market Dream Still Alive?

Though I had joined the industry bandwagon loudly chanting praises of cloud computing, a recent CIO seminar that I attended was an eye opener.

The single biggest reason, it appeared from the questions of the CIOs and IT managers present at the conference, for considering cloud was that it will drastically bring down IT spending for organizations. But most of the proposals they are getting from vendors for moving to cloud is very costly. I thought that the techno-biz specialist speaker, who was representing one of the biggest names in cloud, would quickly dispel the CIOs concerns.

That was however not the case. Yes, the cloud specialist agreed that as of now cloud is expensive, and will continue to be so till the time economies of scale build up. The whole argument was about how the CIO would have had to spend more had there been a spurt in usage demand. I thought this was a very convoluted reason for moving to cloud. Clearly, there has to be a more convincing reason for shifting to cloud, specially for those who already have a legacy in place. Actually, even for the small and medium enterprises, the big reason has to be the cost advantage.

Then there was a range of other CIO issues that was brought up. How will the cloud vendors ensure data security where the IT infrastructure is likely to be shared with hundreds of other organizationssome of whom could be competitors? Are there standard service delivery levels available in the industry or will it vary from service provider to service provider? The experts did manage some answers but they definitely did not sound like deal clinchers.

I dont think there is anybody who does not know about cloud. What is quickly needed is to build a very strong, point by point case about the merits of cloud computing, from the perspective of the slowdown-hit spending that we have been going through, on one hand, to high growth potential that we are all sure of, on the other. And the tech vendors alone can build this case.

One might not like my saying this, but I think that the much haloed cloud has a lot of questions around it, and unless they clear up, the leap from discussion to deployment will be difficult and slow.