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back to article IDC warns resellers of ticking cloud time bomb

IDC has warned resellers that migration to public and private clouds is happening more rapidly than expected, and they need to gear up for it or risk becoming irrelevant. Figures out today show that early adopters forked out $560m (£345m) on cloud professional services worldwide last year, but by 2015 the number cruncher …

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  1. raving angry loony

    Canada

    For any Canadians reading this, please note that Canada has the lowest caps and highest per-KB charge for going over those caps of any country in the world (that I know of). This means, of course, that if your data is "in the cloud", and you're trying to get to it, it might cost you $5 per gigabyte (or even $1 per kilobyte in some cases) to get to it if you've exceeded your very low monthly data cap with your ISP.

    Cloud? Maybe, but be careful how you get there.

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  2. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Boffin

    Yes and no.

    To put it simply, going cloud means scrapping and replacing everything you already have. Most companies don't seem to have the cash right about now for a big-bang replacement of everything. I can see some companies phasing bits onto outsourced clouds as those older systems come up for renewal, but that's about the best I can foresee.

    Precedent - remember hp's Adaptive Infrastructure? A rebrand by Mark Hurd of Carly Fiorina's Adaptive Enterprise, which was itself largely the old Utility DataCenter, probably the first real private cloud package just no-one called it "cloud" then. With UDC, you had all the management and deployment software to flexibly manage your hp servers and storage and portion out chunks of it to the business as a service, with the ability to charge them on useage if required. The problem for UDC was you had to rip everything you already had out and replace it with new hp kit. IIRC, apart from three big customers, no-one else could afford to make the leap, so hp broke up UDC into smaller packages and services and sold it as Adaptive Enterprise. Several years and rebrands later it's now became hp's Matrix product set. Cloud is nothing new.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    "most if not all consultants need to understand cloud"

    IT consultants understand the cloud better than the marketing industry can possibly conceive.

    Lets substitute the term "The Cloud" with "a poorly defined outsoucing deal".

    For example; "I will put all my valuable data in the cloud" doesn't sound half as appealing if you substitute "I will put all of my valuable data into a poorly defined outsourcing deal".

    That's why technologists don't buy into this knees bent running about advancing behaviour by the marketing industry.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Linux

      It wasn't so, in the beginning

      I have been working with "Cloud Computing" since 2006. I do not define it as you say, "a poorly defined outsourcing deal" but "the need for ephemeral and elastic resources", with all te tradeoffs associated with that.

      When the IDC and the HPs, IBMs and DELLs tell you that everybody is going Cloud, they often mean Hybrid and SaaS.

      Now, SaaS is no joke, Salesforce gives a clear SLA, for example. But this has less to do with consultants, more with integrators, and it does not shift that much how IT budgets are spent.

      Hybrid or public infrastructure is another story. There is where marketing geniuses abused of the original Cloud innovative model and put some lipstick on the proverbial old pig pretending to sell good old virtualization stacks and a NAS as a Cloud. Don't let me tell the names.

      Few of them understand that is not "their" Cloud that will be gaining traction but distributed applications. DELL purchased RNA for sharing memory on the network. You don't need a Cloud for that but expect to see applications take advantage of such "infrastructure patterns"...

      Ah, before anybody says that: a Cloud, any Cloud functions only if the sysadmin has a solid technical understanding of very "old-style" tech like SSH, DNS, VLANs or queue messaging. I said solid.

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  4. Incredulous
    Thumb Down

    A cloudy promise?

    I'm not so sure about all this. While a great majority of would-be users have asymmetric connections to the Internet, cloud storage/backup is almost useless for data of any size because upload speeds are lamentably slow. I tried this for my own relatively modest few gigabytes, and it's completely impractical - taking literally days to upload. Security issues and other anxieties one might have simply pale with this simple limitation which I would imagine for most is a show-stopper, save for those who feel it's worth the outlay to have some sort of symmetric connection.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Not enough bandwidth

      "...save for those who feel it's worth the outlay to have some sort of symmetric connection.'

      Once one factors in the costs of all the substantial symmetric connectivity needed for ALL corporate sites to have adequate access to The Cloud, the savings claimed for going cloudy start to look a bit suspect.

      Funnily enough, this wasn't mentioned in the salesman's cloudy presentation and the networking team weren't invited to offer an opinion until after the contracts were signed. For the less important sites (i,e, those with no sales and marketing people or directors, just warehouses shipping product), it will be just like the 1970s again: all their work dependent on a slow link to a centralised data centre, until someone invents a Personal Computer that could free them from the tyranny of the head office data centre.....

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  5. Mike VandeVelde
    Go

    analyst predictions

    We sold our first one today, which means we sold none yesterday, so if we follow this daily infinity percent increase trend out to 2015, ZOMFG $73 TRILLION MARKET HOP ON WHILE THE HOPPING IS GOOD!!!1!!eleventy1!!!

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  6. Kev99 Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    The Cloud - Another Opportunity for Hacker & Data Theft / Loss

    I have yet to see any quantitative argument that supports using the "cloud" for anything other than giving shade and rain. How many articles are posted on the Register every day of this site or that repository being attacked, hacked, cracked and smacked. And the cloud will be more secure? It sounds to me that it's just another gimmick made up by marketing department to move more of the same old iron. VPN by another name, even. "Go to the "Cloud""? Not if you value your data and customers.

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  7. David Gale

    Integration in the Cloud

    Will someone please try to communicate with the Emperor? "Integration in the Cloud" confirms that those propogating the myth around his Imperial Majesty's satorial elegance have little or no idea of their subject matter.

    Many complex integrations are either impossible or undesireable to deliver in a public cloud. If that turns out to be you, then Going Cloud' can ultimately mean a permanent ham-stringing of your IT Strategy's capability to respond to changing business needs. Exaclty NOT where to take your IT starategy.

    Granted, the software industry got its sustainable revenue model but can we ditch this fashion parade and get back to allowing people with real knowledge to define strategy?

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  8. Pat 4

    Come on Mr. Register

    Can we have ONE day without 'AAAHHHHHHHHH CLOOOOOUUUUUD!!!!! WOOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!!"

    For most companies I know, cloud is a solution looking for a problem.

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Trollface

    The Cloud! The Cloud!

    Bow down and worship the Cloud, for it is our lord and master!

    Seriously, this is as bad as the Apple fanbois.

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