Normal service will be resumed shortly
Some might say it will be difficult to notice, given the (lack of) regularity of my posting here recently - ahem - but over the next couple of days this blog will be unavailable for one or more periods. All should be back up and running by Monday.
The reason is that we're migrating this blog from Blogger to Wordpress as part of a major overhaul of our website and online services. There's a lot going on behind the scenes here, but we'll try and keep any disruption to the site proper to a minimum.
Note: customers of our advisory services will be unaffected by the site changes.
Once our new site is live next week, I'm sure you'll notice some major improvements. Our current site is still essentially the same as it was when we founded MWD in February 2005, and our business and research library have outgrown it.
The new site is way easier to read and navigate, and it'll be much easier to explore our research library and see what we have to offer. Also the site will reflect our redesigned logo and updated branding. Be sure to check it out!
See you on the other side...
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Seven elements of Cloud value: public vs private
In last week's post on
the seven elements of Cloud computing's value, I said that the simple model I put forward looked like being a nice way to compare different Cloud approaches and offerings and see what's really being offered. There's a lot of people jumping on this particular bandwagon, and a lot of the time it's not easy to see what's really going on.
In this blog entry I want to use that model I introduced last week to try and clearly demonstrate the difference between "public" cloud offerings (third party owned and managed, remote installations that you rent capacity from) and "private" cloud offerings (infrastructure that you install and own, but that implements many of the technology platform features found in large "scale-out" server farms run by public cloud providers). I'm not diving into the technology detail here, but rather showing how the value you get from each type of offering is different.
In the diagram I've drawn lines around each of the "cloud value element". Thicker lines mean that more emphasis is placed on that value element; where the value element appears fainter, the value element is de-emphasised or missing.
So, in a nutshell: public cloud offerings typically major on the strategic and economic value elements, and quite often - although the architectural value elements can be there - they're not talked about quite so much. Private cloud offerings, on the other hand, are *all* about the architectural value elements - virtualised resources, management automation, and (in some cases) self-service capacity provisioning.
Another slightly simplistic way to think about private cloud offerings is that they're basically like 21st Century mainframe computers. Built using commodity hardware, yes - but layered with virtualisation, sophisticated SLA-driven management, capacity management, billing/chargeback... this looks awfully like a mainframe (again, from a value perspective, not from a deep technology perspective).
So: public and private cloud offerings: "like chalk and cheese" (as we say here in the UK). That's not to say that one is better than the other: just that they're different, and it pays to understand the kind of value you'll receive from each.
Just like I said in my last post: I don't pretend to have all the answers here, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Please let me know what you think!
Labels: business value, cloud computing, SaaS
The seven elements of Cloud computing's value
Last week I was invited to speak as part of the London leg of TIBCO's
NOW roadshow, which focused primarily on Cloud computing and TIBCO's new
Silver offering (you can see what we think about that specifically
in this report).
My job was to talk about "articulating the value of Cloud computing". This was a fun challenge: so much of the talk about Cloud today starts by arm-waving at the 30,000ft level - and then zooms right down to the level of "virtualised compute resources" and "dynamic scalability". What I hadn't seen so much of was an attempt to map out more of a big picture of the value that Cloud computing can potentially deliver in the context of other approaches to consuming IT infrastructure resources.
So after reading countless blogs, conference proceedings, customer stories and news articles, I sat and stared at a blank piece of paper for a while, thinking about how I could pull all the different perspectives together to show one picture that captures all the different ways in which Cloud computing can potentially deliver value. This is what I ended up drawing and presenting in my talk:
You can see that there are seven elements of value I've highlighted, and they fall into three "value types": economic, architectural and strategic.
- The economic value of Cloud is largely about being able to align the timing and size of the investments you make with the value you receive - variously referred to as "pay as you go", "pay as you grow". You don't pay $millions for infrastructure that only delivers value months or years later; you pay for what you actually need, when (or soon after) you use it. And you don't purchase an asset that then depreciates (like crazy).
- The architectural value of Cloud is about having an simple, consistent abstract environment presented to developers and operations folks that hides a lot of complexity, making it much quicker and easier to develop and deploy applications.
- The strategic value of Cloud might be easily conflated with the economic value, but I think it's different. It's this: Cloud platforms help you focus on what makes your organisation more effective and different, and leave all the other stuff to a third party that is dedicated to doing a great job for a competitive price. This is about focus and it's also about avoiding having to train people to do things that fundamentally don't add value to your organisation (think "Lean IT" if you like.)
Have I captured all the potential elements of Cloud computing value? I'm 90% sure I have - but if I've missed something please let me know! Either way, the discussions I've had around this picture so far make me think that it's a useful model for exploring different Cloud propositions as stated today and comparing them. What do you think?
Next up: I'll post another version of this picture that contrasts the value of "private" and "public" Cloud propositions. Both types of propositions have value - but it's important to be clear about what that value actually looks like in each case.
Labels: business value, cloud computing, SaaS, TIBCO
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