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.
