Blah Blah Blah Cloud

Cloud computing conversations have turned into a version of the old Gary Larson cartoon about what your dog hears when you yell at it:

Blah blah blah cloud blah blah cloud.

Serious Stuff 
There are very serious enterprise IT issues involved with cloud computing. I’ve read some great articles by Lori MacVittie, David Linthicum, Ray DePena, Marc Farley, a bunch of guys in France, and so many others that explain in far more technical detail than I can about the challenges organizations face in any move toward the cloud.

Underlying all of these discussions is the idea that the move toward the cloud should happen. Challenges are not problems, obstacles are not barriers, difficulties are not showstoppers.

In this spirit, organizations should not focus on any single aspect of a move toward cloud, especially any notion that says it’s a money saver. Cloud can be an upfront cash saver, to be sure, by moving large capital expenses into more manageable monthly operating expenses.

Over the long haul with cloud, a company may find itself spending more on IT than it had previously, but with a tradeoff of higher productivity and the improved bottom line that should accompany it. Cars are more expensive than horses, too – and trains and planes more expensive than cars.

Self-serving vendor pitches are part of the deal, and any IT person worth his or her salt should enjoy tormenting vendors with their tough questions, not resent that they must ask them.

Make them define what they mean by scalability, let alone software terms like "flexibility" and "agility." Find out who has already succeeded doing something similar to what you want to do, or engage them to develop something jointly so they have skin in the game, rather than just invoices in the pipeline.

Blah blah blah cloud is not nearly as funny as the original Gary Larson cartoon. Enterprise IT is serious business, cloud is serious business, and there’s nothing wrong with making your vendors suffer along with you as you move toward the cloud.

Beside that, the future of your nation depends on it.

What Was That?
You may wonder: When did some virtualization or setting up an offsite PaaS testing platform become tied to the future of the nation?

In my view, the underlying question has been with us since computers first came into US in the 1940s – only the terminology has changed.

First, a little background on why I think it’s so critical for enterprise IT to take this so seriously…

It Won’t Work Here
Industrial policy is not a popular notion in the US, by either major party. The US and its economy are seen as simply too big and too diverse to "play favorites" the way that smaller places such as Israel and South Korea can, or the way the Communist dictators in China are able.

So I know that my idea of massive, special tax credits for cloud computing would go nowhere in Congress, even if somehow a single Member of Congress thought it a good idea. I’m not insane.

Yet President Obama doesn’t either doesn’t understand or accept the need for bold action on the US economy. He’s proven to be quite bold in his military policy, but somehow gets quite timid and conventional when the focus returns to the US. He doesn’t appear to be able to slice through the Gordian knot that’s sitting on his desk.

His potential Republican opponents offer their usual, tired panaceas as well, with the exception of Herman Cain’s "9-9-9" plan. It would be refreshing to hear what a simulated runthrough of this idea would produce.

But real change in the economy is not going to be triggered in Washington. It’s going to be triggered by idealistic IT buyers who see they’re in a mirror image of the prisoner’s dilemma.

In this case, if everyone makes the bold, brave move (analogous to staying quiet in the classic prisoner’s dilemma), then results can be measured against the same (or similar) initiatives throughout various industries.

One thing I’ll guarantee: productivity will rise in the nation overall, and this is what will lift the economy out of its doldrums. And seriously, you know how messed up your internal IT is; cloud may be your greatest (and last) chance to unstick the spaghetti and create something with a measure of rational beauty.

Let’s Get To It
Sure, the United States must train its workforce for this century and make its education system look more like that of results-oriented Germany. It must somehow survive a long period of "deleveraging" as people pay off their current credit cards, even as new cards are more difficult to acquire. It must simultaneously survive the ongoing housing-price crisis that will not end for many more years.

It must reform immigration in a way that keeps it from turning into Japan – where unyielding anti-foreigner bias has put the country on a seemingly irreversible course of population and economic decline.

Leaders in many developing nations are looking to cloud computing as a way for them to catch up to the wealthier countries of the world. I’ll be presenting my research on this topic at Cloud Expo in Santa Clara November 7-10.

Meanwhile, above all, the US as a united whole must figure out a way to improve productivity, that great Delta Force that has driven America’s economic engine for more than a century. It behooves you to look beyond the "blah blah blah" of cloud computing and do everything you can to implement it in your organization.