Part 2 | Cloud Computing: Has the Hype turned into Reality

A decade is a long time for a big Tech idea to grow up and dominate the world or die down and stay buried. Cloud Computing seem to take much longer to make a choice. Is the hype phase still going strong? How much of it has turned real?

Since the days when Amazon attempted to change the world with its elastic cloud launch nearly a decade ago, top tech companies and tech consumers did many different things. Some laughed at it initially, some created fear, uncertainty and doubt, some called whatever they offered as cloud, and some others pumped in serious money to explore. Google can help us walk through the maze of the decade-long history with many articles titled ‘hype versus reality’ including the one in CIO magazine as early as 2008. So, the jury was on all through these years. The question now is how much of the Hype turned into Reality, after a decade?

Cloud Hype: Next Big Opportunity for Infra vendors

The next big growth opportunity must naturally attract anyone with ideas and deep pockets. The Cloud ideas may have been incubated by Amazon and later by the Microsofts and Googles of the world, but they were not the original big infra vendors. The biggies like the IBM, Dell, CSC and HP already had a huge infra client base to convert. So the traditional Infra vendors reached into their pockets, some built offerings ground up, while others re-branded and re-furbished offerings.

Though most biggies were attempting to build Cloud business lines, the sense I get is that the lights are turning amber on the Public Cloud lane. Didn’t Dell move out earlier and did we not notice another biggie, HP, calling it quits on public cloud offerings. Wouldn’t the analyst lot be eager to know how Dell would evolve VMWare’s (Virtustream) Cloud offerings in future?

Agree that Amazon, Google and Microsoft are fighting it out in the public Cloud IaaS space. Oracle and a few others are giving it a good try – getting in late need not hamper success.

But here is my core question. Did the traditional big infra players taste big success or did they hurt themselves bad eating into their own infra sales? Did their ambition to turn traditional infra play into a cloud play created confusion in the market? Difficult to answer when turbulent weather is forecasted.

So here is my score on how much of this claim turned into reality: 2 on 5.

Cloud Hype: Drives Innovation big time

While the public cloud infra play has not been easy play for many, it spawned off other interesting product segments. The Cloud platform segment, the layer above the infra but below the end use Cloud SaaS segment that was pioneered by Salesforce is one evolving product segment. This “Platform as a service from the cloud or PaaS” is the new two year old wonder kid on the block, touted the next big growth opportunity in the Cloud space. A platform to support application development, deployment and running in the Cloud.

The original Cloud inventor Amazon continues to evolve beyond its IaaS and is aggressively moving into PaaS. There are many others that display big ambitions in the PaaS space. Investments and Innovative offerings from strong development platform players like SalesForce, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Dell Boomi, IBM, Tibco, SAP have fired up the segment.

I am not counting dollars yet, but there is solid evidence of innovation in the Cloud space. So here is my score on how much of this claim turned into reality: 4 on 5.

Cloud Hype: Best Performance delivered

You can stretch Cloud to suit your needs, to deliver the best ever performance on-demand that one can get. A romantic promise from Cloud evangelists in its early days. Covering and controlling the full distance between the Cloud and its final app user has been a monster job. If you solved the app design problem and the cloud infra sizing issue, you might still miss control on the last mile bandwidth or you might miss the user’s browser settings.

We figured out how difficult it can be to deliver on this promise over the past decade. Byte distribution chain is long, can be part owned by many players including Cloud vendor, telco, App owner and the Customer. We have some part of this chain integrated with telcos like AT&T also run Cloud Infra and we have seen telcos buy cloud infra vendors (Verizon buying Terremark way back in 2010) in a sort of backward integration to solve this problem on the distribution chain and offer integrated end to end promise.

However, what is clear today is that Cloud vendor doesn’t control it all. There is more work to be done on the Best Performance delivered promise. So here is my score on how much of this claim turned into reality: 2 on 5.

Cloud Computing: Has the Hype turned into Reality over the past decade?

Here is the Overall Summary of my ‘Hype to Reality’ Scores: