In a clear sign that cloud computing hype is beginning to stand out from background noise, Larry Ellison and Richard Stallman have come out and strongly denounced the hype around cloud computing and perhaps the idea of cloud computing itself. My colleague at Gartner helpfully (and tautologically) explains the situation:
“The term cloud computing has come to mean two very different things: a broader use that focuses on ‘cloud,’ and a more-focused use on system infrastructure and virtualization,” said David Mitchell Smith, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “Mixing the discussion of ‘cloud-enabling technologies’ with ‘cloud computing services’ creates confusion.”
Ellison nonetheless executes a brilliantly cynical maneuver: "We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads." Stallman also rails tautologically: “It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign… somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.”
Now, as an analyst, I’ve seen all manner of products and services being plied to me as cloud computing. I’ll freely admit that at least some of these instances are disingenuous. I will also agree that a fully cloud-powered world is very far off, if not altogether unlikely. But to discredit cloud computing itself as an idea is taking the backlash too far.
We have succinctly defined cloud computing as an economic organizing principle underpinned by several key enabling technologies. Hordes of successful startups are using cloud infrastructure providers to undergird their core business. The bandwidth consumed by Amazon Web Services surpassed Amazon.com’s retail bandwidth earlier this year, which makes Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogel’s quip sound not too fanciful. Moreover, Amazon.com is just one cloud infrastructure provider.
I don’t mean to come off sounding too breathless about cloud computing, but it’s undoubtedly real (i.e. more than just pure marketing hype) and is in the process of standing several long-held assumptions about the technology industry on their heads. A few instances of bandwagon-jumpery don’t mean we ought to take at face value the word of a prophet who has been wrong several times before. If anything, this seems to me to be a case of ‘protesting too much’, which only means that cloud computing is a real phenomenon.
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:47 pm
[…] Longworth follows a research-based approach to early-stage technology investing, where we form market maps and investment theses for particular market segments as we investigate them for startup opportunities. For most of last year, we put qualified investment opportunities with a ‘cloudy’ pitch in the same bucket as our those with a pitch around virtualization. There was a lot of messaging overlap last year between the two areas to be sure, because virtualization projects were being rolled out in a number of enterprises, and the ultimate goal of several of these projects was to build a private cloud. Fundamentally though, cloud computing, while being enabled by virtualization, is a separate area of investigation in our investment research (I had been doing some thinking about cloud computing at my previous gig). […]