Today’s Cloud Computing marketplace exhibits a surprising bifurcation. Public Cloud providers like Amazon.com are all the rage among small companies, startups, and individual developers. Enterprises, however, are largely investing in Private Clouds. Public Clouds are too risky, so the story goes, or perhaps enterprise decision makers are only willing to dip their toe in the Public Cloud water.
We find this trend surprising, because in many ways the Public Cloud value proposition is stronger than the Private Cloud’s, even for large organizations. The perceived security issues are largely FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), as Private Clouds are generally as susceptible to the same risks as public ones (if not more so). Building out a Private Cloud requires capital expense, eliminating the pay-as-you-go benefit that Public Cloud customers enjoy. And perhaps most striking, you must purchase excess server capacity to handle unexpected loads in a Private Cloud. What’s the point in having a Cloud in the first place if you can’t be elastic and save money at the same time?
The enterprise challenge Public Cloud providers have is telling the proper story at the proper time. If most enterprises are at the toe-in-the-water phase, then best to give them toe-in-the-water options, like Cloud storage, Cloud-based email, and self-contained Web sites running in the Cloud. Established Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings like Salesforce.com fall into this category as well. After all, if a Cloud Provider positions their value proposition to the enterprise too far ahead of where the customers are focusing, they may get a lot of smiles and nods in their meetings, but no purchase orders.
Be that as it may, many of today’s enterprises are ready to move forward with more strategic Cloud initiatives. What’s holding them back is a lack of solid information and expertise from the marketplace. Traditional software and hardware vendors are still the source of most of the information out there, and their advice emphasizes buying software and hardware, naturally. You can’t really blame them – that’s their business, after all-but from the enterprise practitioner’s perspective, there is a gap in the available information and expertise that Private Cloud providers are uniquely qualified to fill.
Marketing, of course, is only one side of the story. The Public Cloud providers must base their story on real capabilities that enterprises not only need today, but will require in the near future. Perhaps not ten years hence, but capabilities that organizations can include today in their strategic Cloud planning for the next few years. Many organizations are ready to move forward with their Cloud initiatives, and the Public Cloud providers can lead the way.
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