asks Barry Lynn, CEO of 3Tera.
My response - absolutely, if cloud vendors can learn to focus on 3 whopping commercial advantages they offer, instead of technical talk
- They turn capex into opex
- They offer a utility model - variable, consumption based
- They offer a huge cost advantage compared to traditional data centers and infrastructure outsourcing
Way to boil it down, Vinnie. Good stuff.
At PBwiki, we find that a lot of prof services firms love the cloud model for precisely those reasons. And as opex, they can bill it through to the client.
Posted by: Chris Yeh | August 19, 2008 at 04:18 PM
I am the the poser of the 250 billion dollar question. Is the enterprise ready for Cloud Computing? I hope my answer was not seen as tech talk, thus making me seem like a geeky nerd - I tried to make it read more like an anthropology lesson! :-) (Yeah - right - like anthropology ain't geekishly nerdy!!!)
Your "absolutely" is like a John Coltrane soprano sax ballad to my ears.
Yes - there's huge cost advantage (Who wouldn't want that?!!!) - not to mention huge time to market decreasee resulting from no more constant provisioning and configuring of stuff, thus resulting IN huge revenue advantage as well.
Yes - The utility model creates economies for everyone from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. Small guys can now have world class IT infrastructure because they can "rent" it in small bit sized pieces. Big guys can stop over provisioning for everything and start paying only for what they consume.
Turn capex into opex - yeah, with a refinement (or, as they say in Brooklyn, I'll do ya one better den dat).
Owning your data center, of course, causes you to incur huge capex. But there's huge opex there too. When you move to a Cloud, two things happen. (1) You get rid of capex; and, (2) You start managing applications rather than servers, thus decreasing your own administration costs by up to an order of magnitude. In many cases this will more than offset the cost of "buying IT" rather than owning it.
So, dare I be bold enough to say that instead of turning capex to opex, it gets rid of capex and decreases opex? Ok. I dare. Or, once again, in Brooklyn-ese, I double dare.
Thanks again.
Barry X Lynn
Chairman and CEO
3tera, Inc.
Posted by: Barry X Lynn | August 21, 2008 at 01:40 AM
Barry, Ismael has us together on the panel at Office 2.0...look forward to meeting you
Posted by: vinnie mirchandani | August 21, 2008 at 02:34 AM
Ah - Kindred spirits on the same panel - Almost as cool as Cloud Computing! :-)
Looking forward to it as well.
BXL
Posted by: Barry X Lynn | August 21, 2008 at 11:43 AM