When is a cloud like a mousetrap?

By: Steve Hughes - 13/11/2013

Having joined Colt in 2008, Steve Hughes is the leading Cloud and Virtualisation specialist for Colt Enterprise Services. Catch up with Steve’s latest views at http://www.twitter.com/coltandthecloud.

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The recent Gartner blog “Building (or buying) a better mousetrap” by research director Gregor Petri likened the development of the cloud to some of the technology battles of the past. He said “the history of IT is full of examples of technologies that were not necessarily superior, but that turned out to become winners”, and cited battles like Windows versus OS/2, TCP/IP versus Token Ring as examples of this. He concluded that the cloud race will “likely be subtly – but not radically – different from these historic technology rides”.

This time, I think it is radically different. The cloud race isn’t like the technology rides of the past. The starting point is different: cloud is a paradigm supported by a number of enabling technologies – and while there may well be a battle of sorts over underlying cloud architecture, this is incidental from a customer’s perspective.

This race is more about service than technology, both for IT departments and cloud providers. IT is moving away from the “building a better mousetrap” mentality because today the mousetraps have too many working parts for IT departments to be able to build them before the mice evolve. Instead IT needs to learn how to measure and manage – to continue Gartner’s analogy - the pest control services they use so that they are as efficient and as cost effective as possible.

IT departments are having to think differently, because in future they will prosper through metrics, SLAs and business outcomes rather than technology performance. And if they don’t do this, the lines of business within a company will simply bypass them and source their own pest control service, so to speak.

And for the service providers themselves, it’s about focusing on the service they provide rather than exposing customers to the technology that underpins it. If I had to pick the winners of the cloud race, I’d opt for those providers who can successfully abstract their services from their underlying IT and network technology and offer them in a way which customers find easy to manage and consume.


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