Bob Warfield summarizes a raging debate between Tim O'Reilly, Nick Carr, Hugh MacLeod and many other bloggers around scale, network effects and economics of clouds.
What is fascinating to me in this discussion is there is no mention of IBM, HP/EDS, EMC and a whole bunch of "old-school" infrastructure outsourcers.
As I wrote last year, the major outsourcers individually can boast this kind of scale - these are statements from a series of their marketing presentations
- We manage 2 petabytes of dynamic on-demand storage (that is 15 zeros - lots of little zip drives)
- We have 25,000 Microsoft trained specialists
- We have an IP footprint in 150 countries
- We support more than 15,000 customer data centers
- We do over 3 million desktop/laptop installs a year
- We respond to 25 million help desk calls a year -in over 20 languages
Either the whole cloud discussion is too narrowly being focused on the buzz being created by the likes of amazon and Microsoft (with its Azure announcement yesterday) or the incumbent infrastructure outsourcers are completely out to lunch when it comes to cloud computing.
We may have to commission the Hurricane Hunters to figure out the intensity of these emerging clouds - and in the debates around them.
