I was at Cloud Expo yesterday in New York City.
I heard the keynote address entitled “Parting of the Clouds” from Dell’s Steve Shuckenbrock.
I sat through half of “Patterns of Cloud Computing” delivered by Microsoft’s Bill Zack.
And finally reached saturation 10 minutes into a breakout session led by Mark Wilkinson from HP.
My synapses were put into a deep freeze by the marketing blather (“flexibility”, “continuum”, “engaged in outcomes”, “end-user benefits” ) and mashed up metaphors (“an exclamation point on our journey”).
And the Javits Center’s generous WiFi terms ($4.95 for one hour) only validated my sense that delighting (to use a marketing-ism) attendees was not a concern of the Cloud Expo conference folks.
The speakers all issued pretty much the same cheery prophecy: the end of IT as we know it in around 5 years. Maybe a little longer. To be fair, they didn’t have an exact date for the end times.
The cloud computing proposition is obviously a persuasive one for the C-level executives, and their immediate underlings. In a cloud regime, they’ll be given a credit card to shop around for slices of virtualized data centers from a list of approved vendors. I’m guessing that in the future their monthly meetings will be about monitoring SLAs and perhaps—bold prediction here—buying spare CPU cycles on the computing spot market.
The cloud ideal: everything is here, now!
I don’t think those suits are in as much trouble as the rest of the IT cube dwellers.
Those involved in in-house data center operations, along with remaining administrators, architects, and developers (not already outsourced) are all facing the prospect of looking for second careers.
Cloud computing takes the approach that data storage, computing cycles, and communications are really a utility. And just as we don’t expect every office complex to have its own electric turbines, it won’t make sense for every large business to recreate the same infrastructure for SalesForce.com, Microsoft Exchange, et. al.
The economics of massive public data centers with their miniscule marginal costs lead to metered resources accessed by eventually millions of corporate subscribers.
And cloud apps, according to Shuckenbrock, will not have a made in Redmond label: we’re talking license-free open sourceware.
My one takeaway insight was that the private cloud—essentially the corporate data center as a globally accessible resource—may be a ray of hope for in-house IT staffers. Companies that are reluctant to buy into the complete public cloud philosophy can first transition their data centers to a private cloud.
I learned from Zack about a Microsoft product called Hyper-V (as in hypervisor virtualization technology) that is well suited for reworking an existing data center into a walled-off private cloud, or even a mutant private-public cloud. The point is that the corporate data center hardware would remain.
Speaking on behalf of IT job seekers: thank you, Ballmer.
Related articles
- Monday Morning Cloud Computing (technoverseblog.com)
