What is the end game for cloud computing and the ecosystem around it? This is always hard to predict, but I recently had a rather obvious epiphany about what it might look like. Sometimes the obvious answers are also the best.
Let me explain.
A few things before starting. First, I’m coming at this with a decided bias towards the enterprise (small, medium, and large) as that’s where our product is targeted. Second, many of these ideas aren’t necessarily new, but I haven’t seen them combined quite like this or this exact conclusion drawn. Third, it might seem at first that I’m backpedalling on my prior assertion that SaaS isn’t ‘cloud computing’ and to some degree I am, but I think the final decision is still out, so bear with me to the end.
For some background, I recommend reading Michael Sheehan’s Cloud Pyramid taxonomy.
What is a Service?
It’s pretty important to define this before proceeding. I like this technology interpretation of what a computing ’service’ is:
Specialized, software-based functionality provided by network servers for example, directory services that provide the network equivalent of “phone books” needed for locating users and resources.
But this doesn’t quite capture what a service is in the economic sense. Wikipedia helps us out here:
A service is the non-material equivalent of a good. A service provision is an economic activity that does not result in ownership, and this is what differentiates it from providing physical goods.
Taken like this it’s easy to understand why we talk about “internal customers“. An IT department provides services to internal customers. In fact, providing services is probably the dominant way that departments ’sell’ to internal customers.
I think that in this context talking about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) takes on a new meaning. SaaS is generally considered an Internet service, but if we expand the definition just a bit to assume it’s any software delivered as a service, even internal to an enterprise, then suddenly it’s much easier to talk about what the inevitable cloud economy looks like both inside and outside the firewall.
Cloud Economy Taxonomy
The epiphany I had is basically that while SaaS might not be cloud computing, it’s certainly part of the cloud computing economy. In fact, if you think about it, long term, it makes sense that everyone focuses on one part of the following stack based on their target market. The biggest players will inevitably build all three parts of this stack (e.g. Google’s Gmail), but most folks will wind up focusing on building infrastructure, platforms, or software. Not all three at once.
SaaS
PaaS
IaaS
—
links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SaaS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_as_a_Service
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_Service
Enter your password to view comments July 13th, 2008
As I mentioned, last week had a very robust spate of cloud computing and infrastructure related conferences. All three of the conferences were new and I thought I would quickly recap and review them for folks who wanted to consider attending them next year. The three events can be summarized as follows:
- Velocity Conference:
- Audience: web operations technologists
- Duration: 2 days of relatively deep dive technology sessions
- Value: high for operations and scalable infrastructure folks
- Interactivity: lots of good hallway conversations and opportunities to compare notes
- CloudCamp:
- Audience: cloud computing services vendors, consumers, and investors
- Duration: an evening
- Value: very high for cloud vendors and consumers, high for investors
- Interactivity: exceptionally high as it’s an unconference format; lots of small group sessions
- Structure ‘08:
- Audience: business leaders in infrastructure and cloud computing
- Duration: one day
- Value: medium to high for business leaders, low for vendors and consumers
- Interactivity: very poor; mostly a ‘push’ format; little to no hallway conversations; traditional media or blogger dominated; no twitter or grassroots blogger backchannels
Some impressions follow.
Velocity Conference
Velocity was really a technology and operations focused event, which had a very strong presence of folks actually running large scale web infrastructure. There was also a specific focus on not only running this infrastructure, but measuring it’s performance and scalability. Several presentations were either on cloud computing (EUCALYPTUS), using EC2, or on automation in general.
All of the presentations can be found here.
CloudCamp
CloudCamp is an unconference style event that appears to be gaining a lot of momentum. It was largely attended by folks with a specific interest in cloud computing and was extremely ‘frothy’, to steal an adjective from Luke Kanies. In other words, there was a high level of interaction between participants. This was due to a combination of the unconference format and the particular topic. Cloud computing is clearly ‘hot’ and a lot of different stakeholders were trying to get a better handle on what it is, how it works, and the direction it will evolve.
Structure ‘08
GigaOm’s team put together this infrastructure and cloud computing conference. Although it wasn’t specific to cloud computing, there was a lot of discussion of cloud computing and it was featured front and center. There were a number of interesting panels and discussions, but it was definitely business executive focused and more ‘push’ than interactive. Low froth level you might say. It was still worthwhile though and, in particular, I thought Greg Papadopolous’ presentation had some fairly interesting information.
One huge negative is that none of the presentations or panels are online at all yet, which I find disappointing. Given the level of savvy of the GigaOM team it’s a little surprising how this event came off. It seemed deliberately targeted at business folks without thought of other audiences. I don’t see any reason some other stakeholders couldn’t have been considered.
Summary
Personally, I found all three events of value, but that’s because I wear all three hats: technologist, cloud vendor, and business exec. If you get a chance, hit the next CloudCamp and next year I recommend Velocity if you lean towards the tech side, Structure for the business folks, and both if you straddle the two worlds.
UPDATE: Please see comments for a pointer from Sam Charrington to video from structure ‘08. As he mentions it would still be nice if we could get the presentation material standalone. I particularly want to reference some of Greg P’s presentation.
July 3rd, 2008