Having been an employee at Eucalyptus Systems, Inc. for nearly a year now, I finally can say I get the cloud. I understand the concept, the benefits, the use cases, the technology (*whew*), and how to implement it in the real world (*double whew*). It is also very clear to me that I am in a distinct minority among technical gurus worldwide. Most people just don't get it, and there are some very good reasons for their confusion. I'm not sure there are any great answers to these reasons, but you can't fix a problem if you don't acknowledge it.
Problem #1: No easy ways to build a value proposition based on non-cloud experience.
When I teach our Cloud Connections: Cloud Foundations course, I spend more than an hour on the introduction to cloud computing, carefully building the scenario from the way IT organizations run today, virtualized or not, to how cloud technology and concepts layer on top of that to provide transformational benefit. I can get away with this in a technical training class where I've got lots of time, but in our sound-byte, "give me the overview" society of overly busy technical decision makers and IT professionals, you don't get that kind of time outside of the classroom. What happens then is the creation of a number of catch words, buzz phrases with specific meanings in the cloud, and "quick fix" webinars (admittedly by Eucalyptus and our coopetition as well) designed to convince the world of the benefits of cloud but without providing a foundation for those benefits that the user can frame internally. This leaves folks with a sense of being sold rather than educated, and/or with a vague sense of the value proposition but with no concrete ideas about what to do with it and why they should move, and move quickly. This is a significant problem for the industry today.
I spent many years in VMware education prior to joining Eucalyptus. Virtualization, when I started there, was still a relatively unknown technology, but we could explain a key and major component of the value proposition in just a few words: Virtualization allows you to run multiple "virtual servers" at one time on the same physical hardware, allowing you to dramatically reduce the money you spend on physical IT assets. We'd show you a picture of a physical server with several little virtual servers running on top of it, and for most people the value proposition was immediately clear, even if they were skeptical of the technology itself. They understood servers, low utilization, the need to separate applications, and the problem of datacenter sprawl before we gave them any information, and they could build on that knowledge to immediately understand what virtualization would provide to them.
We don't have that easy, quick, clear value proposition with cloud computing in general, and IaaS in particular. We can talk about elastic resources, but then we need to explain what elastic means (and it means different things in different contexts... yuck...) We can talk about IT automation/consolidation, but then we have to explain why and how that's different from current processes and explain why we don't think that will threaten the livelihood of the person to whom we're talking. We can talk about application resiliency, decentralized management and control, security, disaster recovery, storage-as-a-service, "cloud bursting," and any of the other potential benefits cloud computing provides, but if we just use the buzzwords and catch phrases - and we do that a *lot* - the listener is again left with nothing more than a vague idea about the general idea of the cloud, and worse yet, potentially left with a threatening view of how the cloud might affect their livelihood if implemented in their company. What we desperately hope is that folks will be convinced enough by our salesmanship to explore further, but even then we don't have a lot in place today for them to hold onto as they make those next steps.
What we need to do is figure out the IaaS equivalent of server consolidation for virtualization and distill it into a short sentence that people with no prior cloud experience can understand within about 3-5 seconds of hearing it and seeing it illustrated. Either that, or every IT person on the planet needs to take the time to view the free Cloud Connections: Cloud Foundations (Free) recording available on Eucalyptus University. :)
Can you come up with a short sentence that encapsulates the primary benefit(s) of on-premise IaaS (private cloud) that could be easily understood by someone not already enmeshed in cloud concepts?
Problem #1: No easy ways to build a value proposition based on non-cloud experience.
When I teach our Cloud Connections: Cloud Foundations course, I spend more than an hour on the introduction to cloud computing, carefully building the scenario from the way IT organizations run today, virtualized or not, to how cloud technology and concepts layer on top of that to provide transformational benefit. I can get away with this in a technical training class where I've got lots of time, but in our sound-byte, "give me the overview" society of overly busy technical decision makers and IT professionals, you don't get that kind of time outside of the classroom. What happens then is the creation of a number of catch words, buzz phrases with specific meanings in the cloud, and "quick fix" webinars (admittedly by Eucalyptus and our coopetition as well) designed to convince the world of the benefits of cloud but without providing a foundation for those benefits that the user can frame internally. This leaves folks with a sense of being sold rather than educated, and/or with a vague sense of the value proposition but with no concrete ideas about what to do with it and why they should move, and move quickly. This is a significant problem for the industry today.
I spent many years in VMware education prior to joining Eucalyptus. Virtualization, when I started there, was still a relatively unknown technology, but we could explain a key and major component of the value proposition in just a few words: Virtualization allows you to run multiple "virtual servers" at one time on the same physical hardware, allowing you to dramatically reduce the money you spend on physical IT assets. We'd show you a picture of a physical server with several little virtual servers running on top of it, and for most people the value proposition was immediately clear, even if they were skeptical of the technology itself. They understood servers, low utilization, the need to separate applications, and the problem of datacenter sprawl before we gave them any information, and they could build on that knowledge to immediately understand what virtualization would provide to them.
We don't have that easy, quick, clear value proposition with cloud computing in general, and IaaS in particular. We can talk about elastic resources, but then we need to explain what elastic means (and it means different things in different contexts... yuck...) We can talk about IT automation/consolidation, but then we have to explain why and how that's different from current processes and explain why we don't think that will threaten the livelihood of the person to whom we're talking. We can talk about application resiliency, decentralized management and control, security, disaster recovery, storage-as-a-service, "cloud bursting," and any of the other potential benefits cloud computing provides, but if we just use the buzzwords and catch phrases - and we do that a *lot* - the listener is again left with nothing more than a vague idea about the general idea of the cloud, and worse yet, potentially left with a threatening view of how the cloud might affect their livelihood if implemented in their company. What we desperately hope is that folks will be convinced enough by our salesmanship to explore further, but even then we don't have a lot in place today for them to hold onto as they make those next steps.
What we need to do is figure out the IaaS equivalent of server consolidation for virtualization and distill it into a short sentence that people with no prior cloud experience can understand within about 3-5 seconds of hearing it and seeing it illustrated. Either that, or every IT person on the planet needs to take the time to view the free Cloud Connections: Cloud Foundations (Free) recording available on Eucalyptus University. :)
Can you come up with a short sentence that encapsulates the primary benefit(s) of on-premise IaaS (private cloud) that could be easily understood by someone not already enmeshed in cloud concepts?
I understand what you are getting at completely. What makes this a challenging exercise is there are many value props. To narrow it to a single sentence will lead to a serious run-on sentence :)
ReplyDeleteYou would need several such sentences to offer value props targeted at different receivers of the message. 'Someone not already enmeshed in cloud concepts' is too broad.
Who is the audience? Datacenter/system administrators? Executives? Programmers? My parents?
I agree Phil, there are a lot of value props. By the same token, the same could have been said for virtualization back in the day, but there was one killer app that everyone - from the IT admin to the CIO - could understand, and it was powerful.
ReplyDeleteIt may be that the same central unifying rallying cry for on-premise IaaS does not exist, but boy howdy, I wish it did.
You have some resources for self study about any exam.If you won't hire any professional.642-813
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