Are We Repeating History? Music, The Internet And The Cloud

The Cloud may be here to stay, but what will it look like in the years to come?

Historical events in technology always remind me of the Seattle music scene of the ‘90’s. One or two bands catch on with the public then the industry responds by signing more of the same, hoping to ride the wave until everyone gets rich. Unfortunately, it does not take long for attrition and consolidation to set in - leaving us listeners with only a handful of those that’ll stand the test of time. What does a music scene have to do with The Cloud? That music scenario I described can apply to almost anything in the professional world: from massive trends (seen in the mobile phone market), to simple workplace rhetoric (see Dilbert). I believe that same scenario will be the case with today’s Cloud providers. As this is being written, providers are being well-funded simply because investors are recognizing a trend. Like all of the dime-a-dozen copy-cat bands that got signed during those music “heydays,” some Cloud providers won’t deliver effectively or they will simply become old news. There are too many of these outfits popping up on a “we can do that too” type of mentality. With infrastructure being so incredibly complicated and ever-changing with the talent pool, that is sometimes scarce. I just don’t see this lasting in the way we see it now. Let the attrition and consolidation begin. How is The Cloud like the Dot Com era? The 90’s not only brought us the Seattle music scene, but also our beloved and revolutionary Internet. At that time, The Internet became so pervasive that people jumped aboard and quickly adopted the notion that one could create an entire business solely on the back of the Internet. The marketplace became flooded with people standing up e-commerce websites or leveraging other e-commerce websites for internet-only businesses. Then the Dot Com bubble came, burst, and the few Internet-only businesses left were the big dogs like Amazon, etc. Keep in mind, the result of this burst wasn’t all that bad. What? Oh yeah. The Internet remained alive in quite a different form. It became pervasive across almost all businesses as simply a portion of a business portfolio. In other words, the internet was no longer a sole source of revenue, but rather a part of the revenue stream. This same logic has to eventually be applied to The Cloud model. Today, companies are considering and/or attempting to take their entire infrastructures to The Cloud. I can recall a meeting I had with an IT Director of a Fortune 500 company, where the conversation quickly detoured to a Cloud discussion. The Director’s message was, “I want get out of the data center business.” It was as if he had just read the statement in a magazine somewhere. I was astonished because their company had recently spent huge amounts of money on their 75 global data centers and wanted to write it all off to move to The Cloud. I found his idea to be flagrant at best. This All or Nothing mindset simply can’t and won’t last - this thought that technology will eventually be viewed as a utility. Plug it in, pay monthly, and let someone else maintain it. The Cloud is not there yet. Not for that kind of simplicity. Technology infrastructure is way too complicated and is too erratic. No matter who owns the infrastructure, it’s going to be a challenge in management and financial aspects. If one thinks they will reduce headaches by moving entire business functionality to hosted equipment, think again. Right now, it’s simply trading one headache for another.

But again, I think there’s a bright side. My prediction is that The Cloud will essentially break down into more bite-sized offerings that are much more addressable in terms of control, security, maintenance, and performance consistency. This to the point where it literally won’t make sense anymore for a business to own and operate it internally (kind of how we buy butter today rather than churning butter ourselves). Because of this, these smaller Cloud and/or SaaS offerings will most likely be a part of everyone’s business, just like The Internet is today.

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Kak Varley is Technology Solution Specialist whose professional history spans all the way from technology sales to marketing business owner, helping individuals and companies overcome business and career challenges while achieving competitive goals.

Kak Varley can be reached at kak at kakvarley.com

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