“While clouds are awesome, they aren’t for everyone. Better said, look different for enterprises versus startups.” After a bunch of housekeeping, Alistair is now talking cloud. Starts with, Nick Carr’s Big Switch and electricity analogy. (required reading for cloud speakers, apparently).
In discussing economics, talks about Moore’s Law and decreasing costs of bandwidth and storage. Points to Chris Anderson’s upcoming book (Free), and cost of Netflix to deliver (stream) a DVD to your home is 6 or 8 cents, will be 3 cents next year.
Now, (key point) that much of what cloud provides replaces work that enterprises don’t really want to do. [Classic example of Theodore Levitt’s famous question (often attributed to Drucker) “What Business are you in?”]
Enterprise has concerns about cloud reliability, however clouds often provide better reliability, scale than enterprise can provide. Economy of scale allows for (requires) deeper technology investment, and deeper infrastructure (hardware, network, storage) skills.
Jim Gray: “compared to the cost of moving data, everything else is basically free”. Makes this point in the context of cloud bursting, hybrid apps that reside in enterprise and burst to cloud. You can do this, but the data needs to be stored/managed in cloud friendly architecture/infrastructure.
Clouds are leaking into enterprise. Lots of (valid) open questions and concerns. Will seek answers over next 2 days.
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