The Wisdom of Clouds - Latest Comments in What is the value of IT convenience?

Re: What is the value of IT convenience?

jamesurquhart — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:30:24 -0000

Well said, Steve. And I completely agree that IT is now under pressure to compete, not just serve. Let's see how the industry reacts, shall we? :-)

Your company/product naming comment is noted, and I made the correction.

Re: What is the value of IT convenience?

Steve Caughey — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 08:20:16 -0000

James,

Billy Marshall’s comment that IT departments are being sidestepped is something I’ve heard on many occasions now. IT departments need to wake up to the fact that they’re competing, directly and increasingly, with public clouds. They need to get their costs down and agility up (and I suspect that they’ll only be able to achieve that by themselves utilising public clouds as part of their back-end infrastructure). They can then focus on delivering value-add through knowledge of the particular concerns of their internal customers. IT departments need to turn themselves into the cloud of choice for those customers.

I’d also agree with his comment on how cloud infrastructures can increase demand. I think the equation is even simpler than the one he uses. If we decrease costs (through increased sharing and economies of scale) demand will increase. Period. This extra demand will not only come from new applications which become viable with the use of on-demand cloud resources, but also from applications which are capable of delivering more value but which are currently constrained by the cost of utilising extra compute resource. These include complex simulations (financial, engineering and scientific) and data mining (geophysical, petrochemical, pharma etc). If the costs of running those applications decrease then, in many cases, we’ll just run them more.

Incidentally, thanks for the mention, though it’s worth pointing out that our product name is ‘Agility’ but company name is ‘Arjuna’.

Re: What is the value of IT convenience?

BenjaminTseng — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 21:11:10 -0000

Is it a bad or even unnatural that we're seeing this explosion? Given the relative novelty of these "cloud" techniques, one would imagine that IT is in the midst of a transition, with inexperienced IT departments inefficiently allocating resources today as they are unfamiliar with the new offerings, and nor are the service providers particularly experienced at pricing or setting their offerings. This short run "chaos" will probably eventually settle down when IT managers re-rationalize their IT infrastructures and cloud service providers rationalize their offerings.