Big enterprise has their gold plated, enterprise grade hardware, and all of their enterprise software support and there are huge bills there. With cloud, this gets cleaned out, all of it, and replaced with open source software, commodity hardware – in Datacenter days are numbered.

The most annoying thing I usually see when I do strategy work for all sorts of companies is how tight CTO’s and IT managers hold to their tin. How tough is to tear down walled gardens and how gate keepers keep pushing people away from “their stuff”. They look like those violinists on Titanic. Due are the days when success was about the number of people you have bellow you or how many machines you manage. Virtual Machines were the tip of the iceberg for the change that was coming and now with cloud, the scenario is quite different and bottom line, change is here either people want or not.

Cloud is just a way to open things up; move from a closed and siloed environment to a self managed (and sometimes auto healing) architecture and infrastructure. If you’re using Amazon Web Service, you already embraced opensource software, remember those days when you hated it ?

For any CFO, moving from CAPEX to OPEX is rather advantageous and gives everyone leverage to invest on things they actually need rather than plan 5 years in an economy that is run by real needs and metrics.

I still remember when in 2005, at the Portuguese Ministry of Justice we needed more servers to handle BAU and a supplier could only them within 2 to 3 weeks and had to send some spare kit for us to cope with demand, and it took 3 days to rack it up. Now we can do that in seconds and with code.

Bottom line is that if you’re not using cloud, you’re doing it wrong.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail