Last week's Structure 09 conference in San Francisco saw the good and the great of the Cloud Computing world come together to talk of platforms, infrastructures and how customers don't listen to them any more.
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff talked of the way Cloud Computing enables customers to engage with companies and providers more readily. This can be good or bad, he noted. “You've got to get your customers selling for you,” he said. “I don't think customer listen to vendors any more. I think they listen to each other. If you get the customer references, and you can get that gravitas around customers talking about you and recommending you and referring you, you're in good shape. If you can't get that going, you're in trouble."
Customers are demanding real-time information so they can make decisions in that way, argued Benioff, but added that there are very few real time technologies on offer. "Even with Google, you really don't see the real-time," he said. "It takes them a while to scan. The only thing that's real-time is Twitter. Twitter's a really good example. I think anything else that constitutes a delay won't be tolerated by the customer much longer. For a lot of customers, they don't understand that yet. I meet with a lot of CIOs and CIO groups, and I'll talk to them about Twitter. They don't know it, don't use it, say they haven't seen it, it's not their generation.”
Benioff said his response is to take such doubting CIOs to Twitter to search for their company or product, along with words like "problem" or "issue" or "sucks." "Then, bam, you can see it,” he chuckled. “That's kind of shocking for them. They don't know how to deal with it.”
Benioff argued that the changing demands of CIOs plays to the strengths of The Cloud. "They are looking for efficiency," he said. "CIOs are looking to reduce cost and reduce risk. Some got caught with their pants down -- they built for a company 25% larger and ended up with a company 25% smaller, and enterprise software didn't help them adjust fast enough."
Benioff talked of the fact that Salesforce.com serves two million users across 60,000 customers and handles 200 million transactions per day using 500 servers in two data centres. "It's the pure-play software that wraps those 500 PCs that gives that efficiency," Benioff said. "Because we don't take your software that you've written and run in your datacenter, we can get much more efficiency because you operate in our managed environment. This is the shift and we will all move into a pure-play environment eventually."
Benioff couldn't resist taking pop at his former boss Larry Ellison's recent grudging concession to the term Cloud Computing which he has previously been scathing about. "Only six months ago, he said The Cloud was ridiculous and made some caustic remarks, which is so unlike him," he joked.
Disruptive
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels described Cloud Computing as a disruptive force, overturning the traditional way of doing things in the data centre. "It's incredible. We haven't seen something (previously) that's so disruptive to how we think about the future,” he said, but added that he didn't see any desire not to own infrastructure at all. “Cloud Computing doesn't mean you move 100% into the cloud. This is not a winner-take-all game.
"I see many enterprises taking a two-pronged approach. They will think about all the new businesses they want to move into. Many enterprises are looking towards to the web to build new applications. But at the same time, they'll take a more long-term strategic view, looking at all their older pieces and where it makes sense to move them into The Cloud."
Greg Papadopoulos, Sun Microsystems CTO, took a similar tack. "I'll pour a little bit of cloud water on this," he said. "It's generally really hard and expensive and often unwise to be moving your legacy pieces over into something new in computing like this, unless you can really demonstrate what the advantages are. I think you're much better off saying 'Where are the new places I really want to differentiate and make money' and then running two infrastructures."
Public v Private
Papadopoulos talked up the merits of hybrid public/private Clouds. "We certainly see great opportunities in mirroring infrastructures that are inside the firewall," he said. "Very interesting will be hybrid models that are run by service providers but appear to owned by the enterprise. We often hear that public clouds aren't as secure as your own infrastructure. I do believe that. I do believe that most public clouds are run a more secure way than most enterprises. And that's just because all of us are in the business of running infrastructure for multiple customers. It's got to be your profession. You've got to be in the business of doing it. Not all enterprises run at that level."
The Sun CTO also suggested that the conversations CIOs are having should focus on platforms, not infrastructure."My conversations with enterprises inevitably become conversations about the platform and not about the infrastructure," Papadopoulos said. "People problems are: 'How do I get a big enough vocabulary in the platform model so that I can really express myself but I'm not locking myself into a particular version of that platform?'. And I think we have a long way to go there."