NY Times this weekend wrote up 5 pages on the upcoming "epic battle" around office applications - Google's on-line versions versus Microsoft's desktop monopoly . BusinessWeek drools over Google's broader cloud computing. NetSuite, a pioneer in enterprise SaaS, is about to go public this week. amazon expanded its cloud offering last week with its "database in the sky". Nick Carr's book on utility computing - The Big Switch is about to hit the stores.
So to provide some balance, Guy Creese at The Burton Group clarifies what he actually said when he was interviewed by the NY Times in the article above.
"...(NY Times) asked me about Eric Schmidt's assertion that the cloud (and hence Google) can handle 90% of today's computing tasks. My answer was, "Maybe in the next 30, but not in the next five."
To me the whole debate is centered around a homogeneous, unsegmented market - when in fact there are plenty of cloud patterns and weather systems.
So in the SME market, SaaS and utility computing are already been gathering plenty of steam (hey, NetSuite has been in business a decade). Even vendors like SAP with BusinessByDesign have acknowledged that is what the market wants.
On the other hand, the POV is larger companies do not like cloud computing. Most large companies have for years tried hosting, remote database administration, remote network management, software maintenance, various forms of managed services - not-on-premise, on a high-availability, SLA basis. What they cannot do is jettison their entire apps portfolio and infrastructure in one fell swoop. So they are gradually ratcheting their use of SaaS, SACS and Utility Computing.
Plenty of clouds out there. Many serviced by vendors the NY Times has never written about. And many delivering value today, not 5 or 30 years from now.
