The realist’s guide to cloud services and what they’re good for

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Bob Lewis.

Hot technology chatter, like most other business discussions, assumes business success comes from brilliant concepts, careful planning, and disciplined execution. I wonder if what actually happens is more of the million-monkeys-at-a-million-keyboards situation: If enough companies throw enough products and services into the marketplace, some will stick, even if the products and services are the result of random tossing, not superior thinking.

Way back in 1999 I proposed a simple set of criteria to bring order to the randomness when it comes to new information technology. According to the proposed model, three filters predict the success or failure of any new technology product:…

• Are the customer and consumer the same people? For clarity: "Customers" are those who make or influence the buying decision. Consumers are those who actually use the product or service.
• Is the product or service affordable? The third "customer" role is the wallet — the person or committee who approves spending. Products are affordable to the extent the wallet doesn’t care about the cost increment. The wallet impact is a separate factor whether or not the wallet is also the customer or consumer.
• How much disruption it causes in the enterprise it’s brought into, as opposed to "the marketplace," which doesn’t matter a bit.

So here we are, with a new year in front of us, after lots of hype about the three big IT trends: The cloud, BYOD (bring your own device), and big data. It’s past time to apply this model to them and see where it takes us. This week we’ll see how the cloud stacks up. We’ll look at BYOD and big data next week…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/the-realists-guide-cloud-services-and-what-theyre-good-210275