Comments on: It's Cloudy, But When Will It Rain?

By: Tarry Singh

Tarry Singh — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:01:08 +0000

I think Chris is right. The torrential rains [which will also have some parties selling in Billions of dollars]will come by 2012.

I expect the great convergence not start only by then and something that will reach full motion by 2015. By then norms would have been set in order to allow for a seamless social/collaborative (which will help firms grow customer base exponentially) and business convergence. So if you are working on a smart idea then do the following as well.

- Learn from other mistakes (yes, you could have sold your company for $100M slicehost had you waited a bit)
- Wait for the technological and sociological development/maturity in enterprise to take place in order to build more mature solutions
- Look for gaps which are being left wide-open such as Security, Regulation, Pricing which can be easily integrated in the common marketplace
- There is a whole lot of little LOBs that can be build on the PaaS stack so you can also do several companies on that stack as well
- IaaS stack needs more mature and robust answers to problems such as bandwidth (intra- as well inter-Cloud)*, they need to be solved. You can be the hero start-up there
- Expensive, toxic software**: You can think on several clever tactics to build an arm within your start-up OR set a start-up that can tell you that you can save 10 times the money on that expensive software stack as well!

So yes wait patiently and torrential rains will come :)

*,** Disclosure: I have both these start-ups in my portfolio (and also several others)

Tarry Singh

By: Joe Weinman

Joe Weinman — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:26:37 +0000

James — perhaps it isn’t “hardcore cloud computing,” and agree that data integration and data quality are thorny problems, but I have to agree with Chris that creating a shared, multi-tenant common repository of information–whether federated or integrated–is a major use case for cloud services: in the physical world, the Library of Congress or the new Magritte Museum in Brussels are examples. Whether books, patents, weather data, or anything else, aggregation follows winner-take-all dynamics, and real-time broadband wireline and mobile access to that information, appropriately filtered and contextualized will create competitive advantage via accelerated business processes and decision-making.

Joe

By: James Watters

James Watters — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:54:45 +0000

Chris,

In reply to

“Think about having 10-100X the information organized by context of the decision/action (history of client, geo, time, customer data, competitive data, dynamic pricing, etc) for every front line worker (doctor, engineer, lawyer, sales rep, food service, hospitality, etc). All delivered real time on any device type.”

I’m sure you are a very smart guy but that is a bit of gobley gook IMHO.

No hardcore cloud computing person I know see’s cloud computing as a data integration revolution. I think you’ve wandered into the wrote revolution with that comment.

Best-

James

By: Chris Albinson

Chris Albinson — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:45:05 +0000

Allan interesting post – it may start raining in 2010, but the monsoons are not likely to come until 2011 or later.

I think we are very early in this shift and there is a tremendous amount of “enterprise class” issues that need to be resolved from APIs, data access, partitioning, security, reliability, scalability, reporting, provisioning systems, etc. This is not to say that we won’t have some great progress in these companies and some interesting early exits. It just means the $1B exits are a ways off.

We need to hit a tipping point when the majority of enterprise applications are cloud based. This will happen – not because the economics of cloud are better (they are), but because cloud based apps create business value through the “federation/mash up” of data and the democratize distribution of this data to point of impact.

Think about having 10-100X the information organized by context of the decision/action (history of client, geo, time, customer data, competitive data, dynamic pricing, etc) for every front line worker (doctor, engineer, lawyer, sales rep, food service, hospitality, etc). All delivered real time on any device type.

We are not that far away from this.

The realization of this productivity impact will have a measurable impact on US GDP and is the point when $B plus company exits will happen.