Clone…err, Cloud Wars
No, this isn’t a title for a future Star Wars movie, but our own future, foreseen by me, (as well as many others) from experience, research and discussions everyday.
No, it’s not this dark and menacing…no sith lords.
The Cloud
We know who the main players in the current cloud arena are and how much they hold of the cloud market.
Many are betting that they can make a dent in that market and as much as it looks like some companies have the cloud all “wrapped up”, it may not be as clean a win as you might think.
One to Many
Most companies foresee having one, primary cloud vendor, yet that may be today, but not tomorrow. As a DBA, I was told over and over again, “We’re hiring you just for your Oracle skills. We won’t have any need for your SQL Server or other database platform skills.” Within six weeks, a mission critical system would be discovered that ran on another database platform and my skills were needed to first recover from whatever cataclysmic situation had occurred and then centralizing the management for it under IT.
How many of you want to take bets on this happening with the cloud? IT is often viewed as a road block by many companies and so the business, when it needs something, will find a way to get what it needs. Historically, this meant getting a server, putting it under someone’s desk and having them purchase or develop the product outside of the IT department. Now, with the ease of the cloud, someone will simply create what they need, have hosted in the cloud what will become critical to a business at a point in the future and then the IT organization will need to be responsible, secure it and manage it.
The How of Clouds
This leaves IT folks with some new challenges. Instead of having to consolidate to company standards for servers or migrate databases or data centers, they will have to migrate between clouds.
This type of need, along with a demand for business migrating into the cloud, will create cloud price wars. They will be very similar to what we’re experiencing with our mobile providers, first introduced among the big four providers when T-Mobile did away with contracts and transfer fees. Verizon, Sprint and AT&T were quick to follow with their own versions to entice customers and make it easier to move from one provider to another.
This is another reason of why I’m at Delphix. I see how important its going to be for us to help customers to:
- Move easily into the cloud from on-prem.
- Ability to migrate from one cloud provider to another when they desire.
Although Amazon and Azure are rulers of the roost today, there are other companies that may be trailing in the arena that may rule it tomorrow. If there’s one thing we know is constant, it’s change. There was a time when we all laughed at the geeks and their smartphones, yet now we all own one. I wouldn’t count anybody out of the race yet and it might be pertinent to start betting on those that enable those in the race.
I fear the days when Cloud is so easy to setup that anyone can do it. Instead of having little servers in a broom closet or worse spreadsheets with identity data on a pc, we get cloud VMs that no one knows about. Missed listening to your presentations at Hotsos this week.
Thank you for the kind words, Jeremy. I do think it will get easy enough that anyone can set it up….and as history has shown for those that have taken that path, within a consistent timeframe, the business will search us out when they fail to “hardware” their way out of the problem and require true technologists to create real solutions in efficiency. An efficient database and application code enhancement will run longer than a hardware upgrade by 10-50 fold. Our job focus may change, but needing us won’t.