Warning – this might end up turning into a bit of a rant here!
IDC have come out with a new report on the prospects for Cloud Computing. They’re now saying that;
The cloud model offers a much cheaper way for businesses to acquire and use IT — in an economic downturn, the appeal of that cost advantage will be greatly magnified, this advantage is especially important for small and medium businesses, a sector that will be a key target in any plan for recovery.
So far so good – of course they’re saying something that we’ve been saying here on CloudAve since it’s inception, and that all of us have been espousing now for a couple of years. Of course when we say it in the blogosphere we’re giving an opinion and inviting everyone to share in or discuss that opinion. When IDC, Forrester, Gartner et al say it they’re doing so in a one sided way. Not encouraging dialogue and charging a heap of dollars to read essentially what has been said previously in the Blogosphere – but no I’m not bitter!
In the report IDC went on to say that;
Based on a survey of IT executives, CIOs and other business leaders, IDC said that it expects spending on IT cloud services to reach US$42 billion by 2012, a growth of threefold that will in part be bolstered by the current economic crisis that began in the US and is spreading around the world.
Which picks a trend pointed out by bloggers a year or two ago and takes a couple of random numbers around it (a date and a USD figure) and wraps it up in a nicely presented folder with a big price tag. I mean in this rapidly changing environment (and even before the financial crisis descended upon us) the situation was so fluid and dynamic that these sort of research pieces lose value before they even come off the press.
At frustrating times like this it’s nice to have a read of Cringely’s rants. Recently he pulled no punches and said that;
The five P’s of IT are Pride, Prejudice, Politics, Price, and Performance, with the last two being by far the least important. Consultants like Gartner are very useful for minding the pride and politics, their real function being to provide $2 billion worth of IT management CYA per year.
I posted about this almost exactly a year ago – calling for the end to the traditional analysis houses. At the risk of repeating myself (something I’m not normally reluctant to do) I thought it timely to reproduce my post here.
The unreasonablemen posted over here about analysts, and whether they hold much relevance in these days of citizen journalism. It’s a good post and got me thinking.
UM state that in their situation;
I personally rely more on the blogging community than the annual, out of date documents put out by these places now.
But then adds that;
The only thing lacking (and I mean no disrespect) is the credibility that these houses have, it is very hard to know if numbers put up by [the bloggers] are accurate
And therein lies the paradox. The analysis houses lack the real world breadth of vision to say it like it really is, while the citizen analysts lack the credibility of the big boys.
The answer as I see it will be for the big analysts to embrace a new model, one where meta specialists provide data on their key speciality – the analysis houses will become aggregators and proving houses for analysis rather than hotbeds of analysis itself.
What we’ll see is a Wikinomics type collaborative model being put to an analysis situation. It’ll provide more timely, more accurate and more relevant analysis – and that’s a very good thing.
And pretty much (without wanting to be self-serving) this is what we see CloudAve as fulfilling. At the moment it’s early days, but we’re keen to build out a citizen created reference place for definitive Cloud Computing analysis – so that IT leaders will no longer have to invest (or more correctly waste) huge sums of money on out of date and out of touch analysis pieces.
As they say – vive la revolution – if you want to join us, feel free to contact us re guest posting or alternatively subscribe to our feed and see where we take all this! Oh and if you want to see more detail about IDC’s report – have a look at this video – kudos for IDC getting with the 21st century and doing a vid but your bad for not allowing external embeds or commenting.
