Zen 2.0

In a previous post I looked at Cloud Computing from many different angles. In this post, we will take a look at it from the angle of cloud consumers and why they care about clouds. On a high level, there are probably six types of cloud users.

• Enterprise IT
• Independent Software Vendors (ISVs)
• System Integrators (SIs)
• Web Developers
• Community Developers
• Consumers

Enterprise IT

Enterprise IT teams are the ones that manages and operates corporate IT infrastructures. They are responsible for delivering applications and infrastructure to support the lines of businesses (LOBs). They are the ones that care most about enterprise features such as security, manageability, reliability, availability, etc etc.

However, they are also the ones that are under huge pressure to innovate and accelerate the solution delivery. Gone are the days that IT can take 3 months to provision servers to support a new business application. LOBs want their solutions and they want them now!

Clouds are appealing to the enterprise IT teams because it provides seemingly infinite resources at their fingertip and the IT teams can provision the resources on-demand. So instead of requiring the LOBs to wait 3 months, IT teams can now do that much quicker.

Independent Software Vendors (ISVs)

ISVs are users who develop products and solutions for enterprises. Traditionally they have delivered their products as software or hardware appliances. The ISVs will need to support multiple versions of their software as most of their customers will not likely upgrade as soon as new versions come out. They may support 2 versions back or 10 versions back, depending on the size of the customers, how much influence the customers have and the maturity of the ISVs. Government entities are notorious in their slowness in upgrade as each version will need to go through rigorous testing process. For ISVs who deliver products as software, they have to also worry about the runtime environments such as the OS, application stack, etc. There are ISVs that have hundreds of combinations they have to test for each version they release. Last but not least, some ISVs simply don’t have the resource to acquire a TON of hardware for test and development due to load/performance testing requirements or the number of environments the have to worry about.

Supporting existing versions and testing for hundreds of runtime environments take a huge amount of resources and limits the resource available for innovation. So clouds are appealing to the ISVs as they can now deliver their software as a service (SaaS). By going the SaaS route, the ISVs can largely eliminate the runtime environment concerns as they can have much better control of the infrastructure they use to run their SaaS. The ISVs can also have better control over how and when they upgrade their products as they generally only have one environment to upgrade, instead of potentially thousands of different environments. And with the cloud, the ISVs can provision additional resources as needed to test their products and not have to worry about paying huge capex upfront.

System Integrators (SIs)

System integrators, such as Accenture and Cap Gemini, are almost extensions to the enterprise IT teams. Their solutions are generally developed as consulting projects. They develop and deliver solutions to clients who have engaged them to solve specific problems. The solutions they develop sometimes are large scale projects that can take months or years to deliver. For years, SIs have been creating best practices from the custom solutions they developed so they can speed up the development of delivery of other projects (but charge the same regardless.

Clouds are appealing to them because they see clouds as one way to help them accelerate the development and delivery of solutions to their clients. They clients will see quick turnaround for solutions and the SIs can easily replicate some of the solutions they developed for one client to another. It’s a win-win situation for both of them.

Web Developers

Web developers are the early adopters of the clouds. They are the ones who are developing Web 2.0 sites such as Smugmug and others. AWS highlights many of these web developers on their blog. These web developers care about time to market and usually don’t have the expertise, desire and/or capital to provision and manage large infrastructures. They are focused on solving a specific problem and the less they have to worry about infrastructure, the better it is for them.

Clouds are appealing to the web developers because of these exact reasons. Clouds deliver to the web developers on-demand and elastic resources, thus removing the concern of infrastructure provisioning. The clouds allow web developers to focus on their problems.

Community Developers

Community developers are individual and open source developers who just wants to have their own playground but don’t want to concern themselves with hardware provisioning. They are very similar to the web developers category but they are not developing a business in the cloud.

Consumers

The consumers in general loves the clouds. Consider the number of users there are for cloud applications such as Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Google Apps, Salesforce.com, Qualys, NetSuite and many others, then you will start to see the scale and reach of cloud applications. In many cases, consumers don’t even care whether you call these “cloud applications.” To them they care about the ease of use and access, and that they don’t have to worry about any software installation or configurations. The wide spread of cloud applications is one reason why Netbooks are so appealing these days.