For CIO’s Sake! Clarity in the Cloud.

Those who love to hear themselves talk about the growth of cloud computing just seem to keep barraging us with numbers, and it is time that those of us with a desire to understand what is really going on demand some clarity into those numbers, because many are obviously questionable, some are even obviously bunk spewn by those who want you to believe everyone else is rushing to the cloud and you must too.

First of the issues is defining what is “enterprise computing”. It amazes me to see some of the numbers thrown about for how much enterprise usage of the cloud there is, then further on in the article have the same author point to the size of AWS or Google Docs as proof. News flash, a huge percentage of the data on these (and drop box and and and) “cloud” providers has absolutely nothing to do with the enterprise. Not. A. Thing.

The next part of this one went quietly by a year ago (and a year before that), but I’ll bring it up again so the slathering fanatics can point their guns at me… The number most tossed about for the “cloud computing market” is not necessarily the one you want to use for decisions in corporate IT. The Gartner Cloud Computing Market number includes revenue from Google Adwords in it. Those numbers alone double the “market size”. Many argue this is a valid inclusion, I argue it is not. Enterprise IT has little or nothing to do with Adwords. While lots of people have purported that this is just an indicator that enterprise IT is “out of the loop” and IT is becoming “consumerized”, I strongly disagree. Enterprise IT wasn’t involved in purchasing ads before Adwords came along, so this is no indication of anything except that Gartner chose to bloat the number. The detail includes segmentation that makes it clear, but the press doesn’t report that part, and Gartner has been around long enough to know that full well.

Raw “cloud market” numbers are good for cloud vendors to position themselves (and admittedly, companies like F5 who sell to cloud vendors to position themselves), but not for enterprises gauging the rate of adoption and what type of applications are being moved to the cloud. Don’t get me wrong, we value our cloud partners, and we have definitely used the market size numbers to position ourselves in the lead for cloud ADCs, but this blog post is about Enterprise IT, and those same numbers don’t help enterprise IT at all.

So we come to premise #1:


    

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Published Jun 15, 2010
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