In the Pulitzer prize winning "The Soul Of A New Machine", Tracy Kidder wrote of an ad that Data General produced but never ran. It read:
"They Say IBM's Entry Into Minicomputers Will Legitimize The Market. The Bastards Say, Welcome"
As the IBM led “Open Cloud Manifesto” is unveiled (I wrote about it on Friday), it is time to honor pioneers who have been delivering cloud based services, in some cases for a decade now. Larry Dignan identifies several in his post – salesforce.com, Google, amazon, 3Tera, Oracle. He does not mention others like Zoho, SuccessFactors, NetSuite and several others.
In a salute to those pioneers I have invited several incumbent cloud vendors and industry watchers to contribute to a guest series I will be running over the next few weeks: What they have learned in delivering cloud services, not just white papers, at price points that IBM and most in the list of vendors supporting its manifesto will struggle mightily to come close to.
