Listen to any IBM or Verizon or SAP cloud pitch and somewhere, somehow the old bullet “We will turn your capex into opex” will show up. The elephant in the room is “Where do that customer capex disappear?” It should move from the customer’s balance sheet to the vendors, but has not to date.
Being earnings season you get to read Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook financials. These companies spend billions on data centers and infrastructure. Even Microsoft has for its Azure cloud. And that for mostly consumer functionality.
For enterprise grade, industrial strength cloud computing should not IBM and other enterprise vendor have massive amounts on their balance sheets? I asked Verizon once, and they brought me a number for all their capex – FiOS, cell towers etc. When I asked them – only for data centers, they said they do not break it out. Hmmm…
Maybe they are doing an Apple. Remember when it was under construction, Apple’s massive iCloud data center would not even show up on Google Earth? So, maybe the enterprise vendors are hiding both the financial and physical presence of their pyramids
But as a customer, I would ask an enterprise salesman “How will my capex disappear?”
Get ready for a show that would make Penn and Teller proud:)
