You know the expression “It’s tough to soar with eagles when you are surrounded by turkeys.“ Well, its even tougher when you are even lower – as in swimming with crabs at the bottom of the pond.
In the last few weeks, I have heard from several organizations, they are getting less and less concerned about cloud security, availability etc. But they are scared to go to the CFO and say let’s write off that sunk cost of infrastructure or the unamortized ERP project cost. Or go ask for the early termination fee to cut themselves out of traditional data center outsourcing deal. Even though the new cloud economics being proposed are attractive.
So, instead they dream up feel-good projects called “private clouds” which via virtualization should bring some efficiencies – but will never allow their scale to exceed even .1% of what Microsoft and salesforce and amazon are building.
Yup, that slowly depreciating piece of asset sunk at the bottom of the pond is stopping them from soaring in the cloud.
Cloud vendors cannot pretend the issue does not exist. Best if they model for each prospect the impact of the writeoff versus the savings they could be getting from the cloud and play that back as part of the sales process.
