Daily Archives: February 5, 2009
What’s hot?
January was a crazy, crazy month, and February looks to be shaping up to be just as intensive, if not more so.
During January, in the fifteen available working days (the days not completely consumed by travel or by our research planning process), I had one hundred interactions — one hundred individual client/prospect inquiries or visits.
This first week of February alone, in four working days, I’m going to have thirty-four interactions. The only reason there aren’t more is that I’m physically out of schedulable hours.
What do all of these people want to talk about? Mostly cloud computing in the form of public cloud infrastructure services (40%), colocation (20%), and CDN services (20%). (Percentages are for this week.)
It’s pretty much all about cost savings, right now.
The hardware-vendor cloud
Are hardware vendors the natural winners in cloud infrastructure services?
I don’t think so. Having the lowest cost of server hardware simply isn’t enough. The failure of both Dell and Intel to build successful hosting businesses ought to make that clear. (Dell sold to Sprint, and Intel sold to Savvis, at a significant loss.) Hosting is not an exact parallel, but it’s close enough to look to it for hard-won lessons. Like hosting, cloud infrastructure services are not and will not be just about the lowest costs possible. Cloud will still also be about service, support, and features.
CloudPundit: Massive-Scale Computing 