NetApp’s Dave Hitz and others discuss doing business in the Cloud

How cloud can affect you
While Lieberman provided a lot of points to really ponder that some could view as negatives, it’s important to remember that cloud does have far more positive benefits.
“Cloud isn’t the solution to all problems,” he says. “It does represent a unique opportunity for small and medium-size shops that don’t have dedicated IT, in which case, they would find that the cloud solution providers can provide a compelling Op-X opportunity to offload many of the things that they have.”
Experts also agree that cloud technology is the way business of the future is moving, and that it really does need to be embraced on some level.
“I’ve had the opportunity to ask a lot of CIOs, ‘How is cloud computing affecting your business? How much cloud computing are you using?’” Hitz says. “The most common answer I get is, ‘It doesn’t affect our business at all yet, and we’re not using it at all yet.’ I will tell you that almost all those CIOs are wrong. They’re already using it but not thinking right.”
Hitz says that CIOs need to think differently and brings up the early days of the transition from the mainframe to the PC as an example. In those days, if you asked a CIO if he or she had a PC strategy, many said, “Oh no, that’s not part of what we’re doing,” but half the employees had PCs.
“When data started leaking out the door because somebody lost their PC, who do you think the CEO went to beat up?” Hitz says. “The CIO, and the CIO said, ‘Well, PCs aren’t really IT.’ Those are the CIOs that are gone. I predict the exact same thing is going to happen to the CIOs who think that cloud computing isn’t happening in their business. … There’s an enormous amount of work that CIOs need to start thinking about — how do I get my arms around all the cloud contracts that are being found in little places scattered around.
“It’s affecting a lot more than people are realizing because they’re not defining it broadly enough. If they look at that broader definition, the stuff they’re already sort of doing or in denial about, that stuff is a pretty good road map to where the future is headed, just more.”
Not only is it affecting how your business will run, but it’s also going to change the game for how new companies enter the market. Brian Jacobs is the founder and general partner of Emergence Capital Partners, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm.
“Silicon Valley is very much a startup culture — there’s always something starting up here, and it’s important to note that cloud computing also changes the economics of a startup,” Jacobs says. “A startup today doesn’t need as much capital to get going because of cloud computing. A developer, who could be an independent contractor, an engineer who’s working at a day job and at night has a new product he wants to develop — he can log in to a platform as a service like Engine Yard, and they can start developing their product without a single dollar of investment. They can work for free developing the product until they’re at the point they can introduce it to the market.”
As a result, the venture capital industry is much different than it was 20 years ago. In fact, Jacobs’ company started in 2003 with the idea that more and more technology would be delivered as a service as opposed to built by companies within their four walls.
“Cloud computing and software service has really hit technology like a giant wave and all of these business models are service providers — companies that are building technologies and not selling to their customers but operating it on behalf of their customers and charging their customers a monthly fee in exchange for that service,” he says. “That’s a different kind of venture capital and that’s the focus of Emergence Capital.”
Aside from all the ways that cloud computing will change business, it’s also changing how employees approach their jobs. While people can work from home in their pajamas, it’s often difficult, and in many cases, employees don’t have access to everything that they could if they were on their PC actually in the office.
“Cloud computing lets you access your work environment, and you’re on your couch — maybe in your pajamas — and you’re doing real e-mail and doing real work, and yeah, maybe your boss is getting a little more work out of you, but you’re doing it, quite honestly, voluntarily because you get to work in your environment, you’re not in the office, you’re not sitting in front of the computer in the office and you probably have better TV shows on,” McNaught says. “The technology that cloud computing provides is about saving cost and delivering additional benefits.”
To give you a real example, Hilton Hotels decided to close its physical reservation centers and send all of its reservationists home with these devices that connected them securely to the Hilton system.
“What Hilton found was they could close all those buildings and save those costs of real estate, and they saved all the energy costs of running the PCs in the buildings, and they found the employees were happier because they were working from home — maybe in their pajamas but nobody could tell, and they were working over secure devices, so Hilton didn’t lose any data, and they were working over a device that didn’t have the complexity of the PC, so they weren’t calling the IT staff out to their homes to fix this,” McNaught says. “Cloud computing allowed Hilton to save money in so many ways that satisfaction increased, and they found that people working at home would take a lower pay. They saved on all sorts of fronts. Cloud computing has a transformative effect on all kinds of business.”
Cloud computing is changing the way businesses start and operate, and if you recognize and embrace that, it can make all the difference in how successful your organization can be.
“The reality is, as companies try to find ways to grow and compete in an ever more challenging economy, you have to do something different to be different than your competitor,” McNaught says. “If everyone is using the same old client server architecture — the PC connecting to the server — you really don’t have many opportunities to compete.”
How to reach: NetApp, www.netapp.com; Engine Yard Inc., www.engineyard.com; Wyse Technology, www.wyse.com; Emergence Capital Partners, www.emergencecap.com, Lieberman Software Corp., (800) 829-6263 or www.liebsoft.com