Ever heard the phrase 'crossing the chasm'? It's what technology marketing people talk about when they refer to a new product or service entering into full scale, mainstream adoption. The phrase was coined by Silicon Valley guru Geoffrey Moore, who has authored several technology marketing 'bibles'. BusinessCloud9 caught up with Moore at the SAS Premier Business Leaders conference in London to solicit his thoughts on Cloud and the Chasm.
“If you look at it in terms of the Gartner Hype Cycle at work, Cloud Computing is approaching the apex of the cycle,” says Moore. “In that model, you have the visionary people who are very enthusiastic and the pragmatic people who are very negative about it. The latter are in the trough of disillusionment and have the witch hunts and get the garlic out to drive it away.
“My answer is what we call the stairway to heaven. The bottom step of the stairway is where the conservatives sit while the top stair is where the visionaries are. Now the question becomes how many steps there are between the bottom step and the top step. How many iterations are there between the dream and the current reality? We encourage all our clients to build their own stairway to heaven to help them decide what step they should be on.
“The bottom step is the immediate reality of some version of virtualisation. We talk about managed hosting. We haven't managed to change the politics of software or the realities of those issues, but we've decided to pool our back office capacity. The next step up is that class of applications that are inherently Cloud-based from birth. These are the ones that you ask why you would put them in a data centre where they would be like a pig on a bicycle. There are the web-based consumer facing applications that we all know and now there are some prescient vendors like Salesforce.com and NetSuite in the business space."
Climbing the stairs
So far, so simple. Now it gets more complex. “Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff would say to you, 'Why not take Force.com and build a next generation of applications?'. Now, that's not impossible but it's ccrtainly visionary so you'd have that as a step near the top of the stairway. The problem becomes when you see Oracle and SAP re-engeering for SaaS. What step does that go on?”
Well, maybe not even on the steps? After all, SAP has failed to deliver on its Business ByDesign offering as quickly as it was supposed to, surely? “The problem with Business ByDesign is actually that it was released too soon!” suggests Moore. “SAP went to market with it too early. It's the equivalent of consumer packaged goods brought to you by the Soviet Union. These are optimisers trying to be innovators. How can you expect to see world class design innovation from people who are committed to prior generations of architecture? You can't ask SAP to be what it's not. There's another 50 years of work for SAP to do in with what it has. It is hard in the technology industry when you become mature. Technology is like Hollywood – it glorifies the 20 year old, hard body and when you don't have a six pack you feel out of it.”
So who is getting it right? “The big successes in Cloud Computing are Google and Amazon. For neither of them is Cloud Computing a phenomenon. It's not primary at the heart of their business models. Amazon sells books, Google does search. If I were on the board of Google, Cloud Computing would be about the 99th thing on my agenda. There is so much else that that company has to do. Google sort of goes against every business tenet I hold. I think you should focus on your core activity; Google believes that everything is core. “
That mindset may explain why so many people assume that Google will ultimately make a serious push into the business applications space, either on its own or through buying one of the existing SaaS applications leaders. Moore reckons this would be a bad idea. “I don't actually think that Google should have any business applications, but what the hell do I know?” he laughs. “The whole world is moving online. Google literally is the switch at the centre of the entire online world. It has so much else to be doing.”
Chasm crossed?
So has Cloud Computing has crossed the chasm? Or will the market wait for the likes of Oracle and SAP to deliver something Cloud-based before widespread adoption can occur? “The market will slow whatever they do,” reckons Moore. “Pragmatic people only adopt things when they see other like them adopt the same things. If they big guys like Oracle and SAP come in and say they've got something in The Cloud then the pragmatists will say 'Great, let's go to some seminars and see what it is'. There's nothing that pragmatists like more than going to seminars!”
Alternatively the pragmatists could call on the services of the consultancy firms to tell them what to think. There will be a role in The Cloud for the consultancy industry, reckons Moore. “When the visionary business person beats up the CIO on Cloud Computing, they're going to need someone to help them do it, their own organisation will not be enough. There will be the usual suspects offering consulting, Deloitte, IBM, Accenture, Capgemini and so on.
“The Accentures and their like have been milking a mature market for a long time with a finder, minder and grinder business model. But that model is now like the infantry model in warfare – it's not entirely obsolete, but it is increasingly isolated,” he says. “The problem for those firms will be having to find a replicable business model. They will like the idea of being thought leaders and will like being seen to be involved in the flagship projects, but at the end of the day they live and dies by the larger projects. Cloud Computing might not yet run to enough of those large projects.”
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