Last week, Barb Darrow at GigaOM posed eight questions for the “OpenStack cognoscenti” to be answered at OpenStack Summit.
Before I take a stab at answering these, first a bit of background about me so you know my qualifications. I’ve joined Flexiant after seven years at Rackspace working on cloud partnership and alliances across EMEA as well as helping clients build private OpenStack Cloud Infrastructures.
Now, let’s look at the questions:
1. What’s IBM’s play?
IBM is already pitching Cloud technology, however to understand their future, perhaps looking at the history of the on-line banking revolution may provide a bigger clue. There were companies like “Smile” and others who developed green field on-line banking as pioneers. The major banks just sat back and watched. When they realised it was what the customer “desired” only then did they rise like sleepy giants from hibernation to either build or acquire on-line capability. The floodgates opened when customer realised the bank would compensate them for fraud, it became “safe” online which created trust and Banks could save money by automating large parts of their high street transactions. Will the same happen with Cloud; who do you trust?
2. Who’s on Jonathan Bryce’s dream team?
Following yesterday’s presentation at Structure: Europe where I presented on, ‘Why ‘Cloudwashing’ Must Stop’, here’s what a few influential people thought:
GigaOm’s Barb Darrow, has picked up on my presentation in her article ‘Why cloud washing is evil or at least annoying and potentially harmful’.
‘Lucas, the founder of Flexiant a cloud orchestration vendor, founder says traditional hosting companies and service providers are doing themselves harm by offering the same services they have for a decade or more, but advertising them as ”cloud” offerings.’
Graeme Burton also published an article, ‘Hosting companies offering ’10-year-old’ services as cloud’ and wrote:
Tony Lucas presented at Structure: Europe, ‘Why ‘Cloudwashing’ Must Stop’. Watch the 15 minute presentation below and let us know what you think.
