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Can vendors help enterprises with cloud adoption? Or is adoption contingent on time and maturity?
This event is a part of Focus Cloud Week (June 27-30, 2011), which is a series of free webinars and roundtable panels that explore the business drivers prompting the migration to the cloud, the challenges, and the experiences of pioneering adopters. For a listing of related events and community activity, please visit and follow Cloud Week on Focus.com.
Best Answer
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- Brielle Nikaido
Awesome question Brielle. It's a little bit of both I believe.
Yes vendors can be sure to have answers to all customer questions by way of research, whiepapers, certification etc etc, but at the same time, there's no pushing a customer that just isn't ready, sometimes it's best to wait until an organization is really prepared for the bigger picture changes that cloud can bring.
The bigger issue here is how much of Cloud adoption is a cultural change and how much is merely a technological change...
The vendor can also help the customer understand where they are in maturity scale and which elements of the IT landscape to best address first. Of course, for that you need a portfolio of services rather than trying to cram the customer into a "one-size fits all" solution.
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- Mike Nelson
Here comes the official consultant answer ... wait for it ... it depends!
It depends upon what that vendor is selling. With everything being re-marketed as "cloud" these days, there's certain vendors' products that really don't have anything to offer enterprises in the way of adoption strategies. Whereas companies that are selling cloud infrastructure clearly have a lot of information points to share with customers these days. If the vendor can help the customer identify and eliminate hurdles to the adoption of their product, they will go a long way to helping that customer adopt cloud computing as a general approach. It's critical to remember, just because I decide to go Salesforce.com for my CRM, doesn't mean I'm ready to move all my applications to the cloud.
In an enterprise context, much of the conversation is still focused on the infrastructure and hasn't moved up the stack to how enterprise applications need to change in order to take full advantage of the cloud.
Cloud vendors such as rackspace, amazon and google can provide you with commodity infrastructure service offerings but enterprises require something more holistic that includes guidance on cloud applications as well...
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Absolutely they can! The key is providing tools which allow enterprises to specify which workloads are suitable for public clouds, and which need to be kept private. Abiquo calls this "business policy" - it covers many areas; load balancing, utilization, security, compliance, governance, reservation, association ... With a well established business policy, enterprises will be confident to burst into the public cloud.