IT is windy and cloudy

The last fortnight could be classified as the official cloud period of the year with multiple conferences vying for attention; it also saw business newspapers and magazines write about clouds. A couple of television channels aired hyperbolic programs with the usual set of vendors and spokespersons talking about why enterprises have to adopt the cloud for survival. One of these had an interesting open and candid discussion between two senior CIOs on clouds which kept the organizers on their toes and the audience regaled.

A brave move by the organizers, in an unstructured dialogue with no moderator, their bantering got off to a good start with sharing of experiences on how they had used various technology solutions to create purported private clouds as well as engaged with third party service providers to leverage varied cloud offerings. They unanimously admonished the vendors for creating hype more than they could deliver in reality. The hysteria parallels the dotcom era in its fervor with everything being tagged to the cloud.

The senior retired CIO used his sharp wit and tongue challenging the audience if they had different experiences. He demolished a few hypotheses and claims as myths with no evidence apart from anecdotal references. He sought to differentiate between public cloud solutions for consumers from ones available for enterprise users. The clouds are drifting with the wind created by a lot of hot air in the room, so let’s be practical and realistic in promises to customers on cloud solutions.

We all know that cloud for the consumer has been a big hit connecting mobile devices to ubiquitous cloud solutions offering multiple for purpose apps. Almost all the content is uploaded or downloaded to or from the cloud with seamless access across multitude of devices. Try for free, if you like it, buy it; micropayments allow easy download and upgrades, and if you don’t like it, you don’t feel the pinch. From tweens, teenagers to grandfathers and grandmothers everyone is hooked on in varying degrees.

The corporate journey started with sales applications gradually moving on to full-scale sales force automation solutions; employee self-service and customer facing portals (B2B or B2C) kind of rounded off the foray on the public cloud. Test & Development, archiving, and experimentation of new solutions were the other deployment cases. None of the core applications moved to the cloud; small and medium enterprises, and start-ups though did find the cloud offering quick solutions at affordable costs.

All As-A-Service models worked on the assumption that enterprises are desperate to move their capital investments to operating expense; in reality all of them were not excited. The variability of expenses that clouds promised was rarely delivered with rigid contracts and time to (re)provision. ROI remained elusive in the public and hybrid cloud models, the private cloud (which was created as a term to appease the CIOs who did not embrace the real cloud) did provide some benefit with agility and higher utilization.

Re-purposing a consumer offering to the enterprise (read the micro-app nemesis) has many challenges which I guess will eventually get resolved; the reverse may to the consumer as I know is not been ideated; the boundaries are blurring between the two. While the transactional need fulfilled by enterprise applications will rarely move to the cloud or onto the mobile, information consumption and field data gathering will become key processes working off the same personal mobiles on the public cloud.

With the boundaries between consumer and corporate devices no longer tenable and enterprises adopting BYOD, the next disruption will be the convergence and unification of the consumer and enterprise device, and applications. Until that happens, the debate will continue on where the cloud has a promise for the CIO and where it impacts the person the CIO is. Stock tickers, games, utilities and what have you gratify the individual and are perceived as a distraction and risk by the enterprise.

Coming back to the chat, a vendor in the audience challenged the duo that the vendor had customers who have successfully deployed the cloud but meekly backed off when challenged to verbalize the business case and benefit. The hot air was indeed clouding a normal discussion; so the CIOs agreed to wind up the discussion with the conclusion: clouds are here to stay, they are/will be a part of the IT setup, don’t go gaga over it, be pragmatic, practical and deploy only if it fulfills a business need. Sound advice if there was one !