Moving on from Cloud’s Trough of Disillusionment
July 27, 2011
Recent conversations with suppliers in the Cloud industry suggest that we’re currently experiencing the Trough of Disillusionment for Cloud Computing.
Hosting providers haven’t experienced customers beating down their door to buy Cloud hosting, and they’re giving up on the trend.
Does this mean that it is all just purely hype, with no substance?
I would say not at all, just rather that it shows that Cloud is no exception, it’s not different from any other technology in that it needs directed towards specific customer needs and solutions, rather than just as a generic hosting capability. Ie. they’re not going to just start buying lots of Cloud services because we’re all excited about it.
Actually the reality is that if you’re targetting developers with an IaaS offering, and competing on price/product features like how many Gb for $x, then you’re going head to head with Amazon et al, and if you don’t have the same marketing budget then they’re never likely to go passed them to get to you.
Solution Selling Cloud Computing
In short, like for any other product or service it has to be clear to the customers how it is solving the problems of importance to them, in their terms, and smaller players need to identify more specialized segments of the market where they utilize the technology as a means to an end, not the end itself.
Towards the end of last year I predicted this event, and in this article proposed the key is to use Solution Selling techniques and target niche markets. In this example I highlighted how Cloud providers can host open source software and integrate it with Salesforce.com to offer a very compelling solution for government clients.
Since then I have launched the Cloud Best Practices Network, with a view to building a full program to this effect.
This is called ‘Solution Selling Cloud Computing’, and is a set of services intended for Cloud providers who want to achieve this differentiation and exploit key niche solution markets.