Let's take a hypothetical company called XYZ. XYZ is a major player in enterprise business transformation and solutions. XYZ is now in the process of building public clouds and offering solutions to other companies so they can build their own private clouds. Today, XYZ is aggressively pursuing it’s strategy of developing it’s Cloud Computing solution for Enterprise and SMB space.
The business conditions today:
- Amazon’s Cloud Computing play -- Amazon wants to help companies leverage it’s storage Infrastructure
- I have researched Amazon Web Services (both EC2 and S3) and I understand Amazon's Cloud strategy and how that differs from XYZ's and Google's
- Google is also in the SMB space, but both XYZ and Amazon have to be very watchful of Google. Google is very good at silently and artistically expanding it's market share and it can hurt both Amazon and XYZ tomorrow
- Unlike XYZ's or Amazon's strategy it is relatively harder to clearly understand Google's
- My bet*: With Google's Chrome OS (light weight OS with a very powerful and slim web browser) coming out in 2010, Google will likely become a dominant player in Cloud Computing space
- My bet*: Google will leverage Chrome OS and Chrome Web-browser to enter Enterprise space, which XYZ is trying to dominate today
- Quick and easy adoption of Chrome OS + Web-browser will propel Google as a likely #1 player in SMB space
- Consider the Microsoft reaction Microsoft to Google’s competition (from Chrome OS)
- Revenue: There is no doubt that Amazon wants to be the #1 Cloud Computing provider today (primarily SMB)
- Merrill Lynch Estimates "Cloud Computing" To Be $160 Billion Market in 2011
Google's Cloud Computing Solutions Offering:
- Existing Google Products on the web: Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and other web apps, Google provides these apps to Company employees.
- It's all hosted by Google, saving the company time, money and hassles of managing these IT solutions.
- Outsourcing to Google lets companies run their business instead of running routine IT systems.
- Google Apps is 1/3 the total cost of competing solutions.
- No special hardware or software is required, and Google runs the servers so company can focus on it’s business.
- Data can remain on Google's infrastructure, rather than on unsecured devices.
- Get better reliability than on-premises solutions, with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.** (** as advertised on Google.com)
To summarize, it is too early to say how the Cloud Computing market will get segmented. Some say that Cloud sees no barrier across SMB and Enterprise, but I disagree - every business market eventually gets segmented - because every client has at least one unique business requirement. The business and technology people would vastly benefit from a Marketing Report on Cloud Computing, as we understand it will be in 2010 and beyond.
Another argument, while it is possible to propose business development case studies for XYZ, Google and Amazon or any other company for that matter, the key tenant of my blog is that - it all depends on how a company leverages the imminent business conditions to drive cloud technology growth for itself and for it's clients. The technology growth will thereafter fuel additional and high-value business growth. When we see that happening, we will have seen another example of how Business would have come to the Aid of Technology; Clouded Technology in this case.
Analysis in this blog is by Rakesh Parimi.
No comments:
Post a Comment