A great Cloud Computing Industry synopsis
I love this bunch of paragraphs from Phil Wainewright of ZDNET.
He captures the essence of the Cloud dilemma perfectly…
The further that SaaS vendors penetrate into the higher echelons of enterprise computing, the more they’re accused, like the pigs running the show at the end of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, of becoming just like the establishment vendors they claim so much to despise. Complex implementation projects, multi-year contracts with payment upfront, deal sizes that run to six- or seven-figure sums, alliances with the established global SIs, and account management teams recruited from the ranks of old-guard vendors such as Oracle, IBM and HP. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
It all starts to look as though SaaS isn’t the disruptive force its proponents claim it is. Perhaps the established conventional software vendors are right after all when they say that the only reason SaaS seems better, faster, cheaper is because it lacks the sophistication to satisfy top-class enterprise needs. If it ever evolves sufficiently to match those needs, the end result will look no different from the incumbents, they argue.
The counterpoint is to observe that, if you take a disruptive innovation and smother it in products and practices better suited to its establishment rivals, then it’s bound to get bogged down. What is the point of inventing a completely new approach to application development and deployment, only to saddle it with outdated implementation practices, brittle integration technologies and bureaucratic lifecycle management? SaaS vendors should be more wary. All the energy and potential of SaaS is getting squeezed out and drained away by the old deployment and management models. To reverse the familiar phrase, if you wear the pig’s lipstick, don’t be surprised if you end up looking like a pig.
In the past decade, SaaS has evolved enormously in terms of the application platforms themselves, but progress has barely started when it comes to applying cloud models to the implementation and lifecycle management processes. If cloud services are going to avoid the fate I’ve outlined above, then there needs to be a disruptive change in those areas, just as much as in the platforms themselves. This revolution won’t be complete until the current business models of the global SIs — Accenture, Deloitte, IBM and the others — are as comprehensively undermined as those of the software vendors they’ve traditionally worked with.
Couldn’t agree more…
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