I paraphrase the famous proclamation “The King is dead. Long live the King.” The essence of the kingly proclamation is that the current king has died, and the transfer of sovereignty has occurred immediately to the next in line; the new king.
In “times past” (referring to the last 3-4 years), the phrase “cloud computing” was largely seen as something new and distinct from the software normally run by an organization. The software industry itself separated itself into those companies who produced software that ran in the “cloud”, and those companies who produced software that is run on premise at a customer’s office or home. To many of the early cloud software companies, the idea that some customers might want to run software on customer owned computers seemed anathema. Some even went so far as to proudly pronounce that their systems contained “No Software”. Because of the marketing hype, traditional software vendors all rushed to create “cloud strategies”, which often entailed either a complete rewrite of their system, or the acquisition of a “next generation” cloud software company.
For traditional on-premise software vendors, both of these strategies are problematic. A complete rewrite of their software is costly, takes time, and will not actually help any of their existing customers. The acquisition of technology may seem like a good idea, but can often involve just as much time trying to make the new code provide the robust functionality that already exists in the exiting on-premise application.
I submit that this definition of “cloud computing” is now dead. In its place, the new “cloud” is now king, where cloud based systems are not something distinct from on-premise systems. Cloud systems are now integrated into complete solutions incorporating both on-premise components together with hosted components. The distinction is no longer as relevant, as end customers want solutions, and are not religious about how that solution is provided to them.
I plan to continue to expand this thought in future posts.
1 response so far ↓
1 Bill Aumen // Jan 18, 2011 at 8:57 am
The first person bold enough to make this proclamation! Way to go Chris. Many of us just kept quietly providing our clients the solutions they wanted, rather than hyping the technology, but all the while with doubt in the back of our minds: what if we are missing the point of all the marketing hype and are becoming irrelevant without even realizing it… The great part of being in the business for a few years now is you know not every marketing phrase actually results in a revolution. But we do keep learning and improving.
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