CIO Dashboard » Public Cloud Adoption

Public Cloud Adoption - Where Are You?

post by Chris Curran on October 7, 2009

by Chris Curran, Nalneesh Gaur and Rob Warren

In distilling perspectives from our clients for two upcoming events on cloud computing (Diamond Exchange, InfoWorld), we have developed an informal categorization that captures where companies are in adopting public cloud computing offerings. “Not Interested/Not Applicable” could have been an option for our list but we don’t know anyone not at least looking into applying the cloud.

Our clients fall into one of six categories in their cloud exploration and adoption:

Surveying the market
Using an off-the-shelf cloud service or app
Using a customized version of off-the-shelf cloud app or service
Developing/developed a custom app on a cloud platform
Integrating cloud app with in-house app
Multiple cloud apps integrated with multiple in-house apps

Surveying the Market

Several companies are still learning and evaluating. There are three example companies we are working with who fall in this category. A financial services company who deals in very small and very high-speed transactions isn’t convinced that any cloud players can provide the processing horsepower within their SLAs and security constraints, but they continue to survey the market. Maybe a less mission-critical application will be more appropriate? An industrial products company we work with tends to move in a more measured way when evaluating new technologies and approaches and are, in that vein, just taking their time. Finally, one of our clients is a managed IT services vendor and is interested in moving some of their in-house help desk apps into the cloud for their clients and maybe as a more general offering - still evaluating though.

Off-the-Shelf Cloud Service

All of the users of vanilla Salesforce.com, Google’s Docs and Mail services, multi-media hosting, cloud-based backups and the host of others fall in here. (Un)fortunately, these services are so easy to buy and use, some corporate users are buying directly instead of through more formal channels (procurement, IT, etc.). To combat this, one of our clients is establishing blacklists on their perimeter to clamp down on unapproved usage.

Customized Cloud Application

This takes the vanilla cloud app a major step further in that the organization must commit some resources to learning the cloud provider’s development tools, languages and quirks. Beware of vendor lock in due to proprietary development tools, APIs and runtime environments. Several companies who use Salesforce.com have added custom functions and extensions to the core system using Force.com’s visualforce, application frameworks and APIs.

Custom Application on Cloud Platform

Instead of using an off-the-shelf business application, some organizations are using cloud based application development platforms like Amazon’s EC2, Google’s Python environment of 3tera. Because Infrastructure clouds are agnostic to deployment platforms, they offer more freedom for building and deploying applications. These all have some limitations - few choices of tools and languages, limited data storage and movement options - but are great for quick and cheap prototyping, especially for web2.0 apps.

One of our transportation and logistics clients is evaluating Force.com and Google’s platform to serve as a basis for a re-write of their core legacy systems that are barely supportable and can’t scale fast enough to support aggressive geographic expansion.

Cloud - In-House Integration

A consumer products client prides itself on its efficient outsourced infrastructure. They, too, are a Salesforce.com customer and use a few other cloud apps to gather customer information and managed on-line communities. Their challenge is that no cloud providers seem to want to take responsibility for integrating the customer data across these apps. So, they feel forced to create an in-house data store to merge and eventually analyze their customer information. We believe that integration services - both message passing and database integration and hosting - is a huge opportunity for cloud providers. Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) offers such integration capabilities, but some of our clients have found it to be limiting in terms of number of queues, messages, and message size and have resorted to in-house application integration solutions.

Diamond has also used this approach internally to create a custom Salesforce.com instance integrated with our Peoplesoft financials and some other in-house databases.

Heterogeneous Cloud Architecture

One of our health care clients has begun the process of moving their internal and partner user identity management functions to the cloud. When they are done, all of their major applications will utilize cloud-based services to authenticate their users. A user’s identity created in this manner becomes fungible across multiple organization as more partners participate in the identity network (which of course adds a whole new set of issues).

Conclusions

It seems like everyone is at least considering the cloud. We think there are significant benefits in having someone else build and maintain application software and the underlying hardware and software platforms and bill it per use. What were are still unsure about is whether anyone has a turnkey service that handles the “whole project” - transition, integration, process redesign, procurement enhancements, etc.

Interested in your thoughts and experiences. What have we missed?

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jfbauer

Representing the legal services industry, with so much custom software developed to support document coding and data management and reporting with a strong focus on security, the ability to transition to the cloud does not immediately fall inline with the current IT multi year plan. Thus, extrapolating to the wider legal services industry, I would venture to say we collectively fit in the first category.

Related blog: http://bit.ly/ZsozZ
jfbauer

Representing the legal services industry, with so much custom software developed to support document coding and data management and reporting with a strong focus on security, the ability to transition to the cloud does not immediately fall inline with the current IT multi year plan. Thus, extrapolating to the wider legal services industry, I would venture to say we collectively fit in the first category.

Related blog: http://bit.ly/ZsozZ
Mark Ridgwell

We fall into category number 4. (Developed a custom app on a cloud platform). We’re getting good user traction (particularly in the last 6 months) and mainly from very large organizations. Security is often questioned (by banks mainly) although once we show them our security measures, people often say that if anything, it’s safer than their inhouse set up.

Best regards,
Mark
Mark Ridgwell

We fall into category number 4. (Developed a custom app on a cloud platform). We’re getting good user traction (particularly in the last 6 months) and mainly from very large organizations. Security is often questioned (by banks mainly) although once we show them our security measures, people often say that if anything, it’s safer than their inhouse set up.

Best regards,
Mark
Daniel Eckert

I was at the DX today listening to the Cloud discussion and wanted to raise the following 3 Questions:

IMHO - The value of the cloud is about the apps - not the hardware - as the hardware is just a commodity item and already comes “pre-integrated - all you need to do is snap it together and add power. Then scale it ad infinitum.â€

Now take me into the near future: I have 100’s of miles of hardware performance headroom in the cloud - but if my value is in my apps - Question #1: How long before we see SaaS really make inroads in the CREATION of functional objects that can be bolted together and become self-aware (self-aware of other objects around them - and most importantly - not impact the objects supporting some else’s application - even if they are shared objects) to assemble this functional objects into an application?

If all functional objects are self-aware - won’t innovation diminish? It has been stated that Television has “frozen the English language”. Meaning that eventually everyone will have a common point of reference to how the english language is spoken. The English language has stopped evolving. (ask yourself WHY we no longer talk like Shakespearean actors). If you agree with this concept - hereâ€™s Question #2 - Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by locking into a single language to create even the most granular of functional objects?

And as a follow up - Question #3 - when this eventually comes true how will we “manage” these objects? I feel somewhere in here there is an industry and a role within an organization that hasnâ€™t been created yet.

Thanks again! This is good stuff.
Daniel Eckert

I was at the DX today listening to the Cloud discussion and wanted to raise the following 3 Questions:

IMHO - The value of the cloud is about the apps - not the hardware - as the hardware is just a commodity item and already comes “pre-integrated - all you need to do is snap it together and add power. Then scale it ad infinitum.â€

Now take me into the near future: I have 100’s of miles of hardware performance headroom in the cloud - but if my value is in my apps - Question #1: How long before we see SaaS really make inroads in the CREATION of functional objects that can be bolted together and become self-aware (self-aware of other objects around them - and most importantly - not impact the objects supporting some else’s application - even if they are shared objects) to assemble this functional objects into an application?

If all functional objects are self-aware - won’t innovation diminish? It has been stated that Television has “frozen the English language”. Meaning that eventually everyone will have a common point of reference to how the english language is spoken. The English language has stopped evolving. (ask yourself WHY we no longer talk like Shakespearean actors). If you agree with this concept - hereâ€™s Question #2 - Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by locking into a single language to create even the most granular of functional objects?

And as a follow up - Question #3 - when this eventually comes true how will we “manage” these objects? I feel somewhere in here there is an industry and a role within an organization that hasnâ€™t been created yet.

Thanks again! This is good stuff.