Image by Laughing Squid via Flickr
Steve Rubel, in his blog, has a new post with somewhat provocative title. He talks about recent shutting down of some of the Cloud based applications and calls it “Bloodbath in the Clouds”. A part of his post is a bit of exaggeration but he has some valid points. I thought I will pick on this post a little bit.
Steve talks about recent shutdown of some of the SaaS applications offered by both the smaller players as well as the leaders in this field. He argues that there is a bloodbath in this field and one has to be very careful in choosing the cloud providers. I disagree with the first part where he characterizes it as a bloodbath but agree with him on the fact that we should be careful about how we choose the vendors.
The whole world is undergoing some sort of economic meltdown and its impact in US is pretty huge. As a result of this, we are undergoing some correction and it is inevitable that we will see many failures resulting in the shutdown of products and services. This is not unique to Clouds alone. It runs from desktop software companies to chain stores to airlines to banks. Any portrayal of such a correction to be a bloodbath in the Cloud marketplace is not correct. It is an universal phenomena and Cloud computing also faces the brunt of this economic meltdown.
There is another factor to this whole story. The Web 2.0 and, its extension, Software as a Service era saw the birth of huge number of companies. Anyone with an idea for an app running on the web as a service could start a company, get techcrunched and get users. The major reason for such a proliferation was the cheap availability of infrastructure resources for hosting the web applications. The hype surrounding Web 2.0 ensured that there are virtually thousands of new services coming up, offering anything from simple task management to complex social networks. During an economic meltdown, many of these services will go down either due to lack of resources to run the operations or due to developers moving to greener and/or stable pastures. This is normal and the effect appears like a bloodbath because there was a mushroom like proliferation of web applications and mindless adaption by the users. Users were signing up for these web applications without even thinking about the utility value of such applications in their daily workflow. Lack of a clear strategy on the part of users (but Steve Rubel was smart enough to setup a strategy based on a reliable service like Gmail) is one of the big reasons for this apparent bloodbath.
In fact, this is a perfect reason why users of web applications/SaaS/Cloud Computing should regularly visit a blog like Cloud Avenue. Here, we talk about the positive and negative aspects of Cloud based computing. Regular readers of this blog will know about the post where we talked about the questions to ask before trusting a cloud vendor and the ongoing SaaS Risk Reduction Series. It should also be noted that, contrary to what Steve Rubel wants you to believe, SaaS can be resilient to recession.
Post Comment