This is a brand-new Magic Quadrant; our previous Magic Quadrant has essentially been split into two MQs, this new Public Cloud IaaS MQ that focuses on self-service, and an updated and more focused iteration of the previous MQ, focused on managed services, called the Managed Hosting and Cloud IaaS MQ.

It’s been a long and interesting and sometimes controversial journey. Threaded throughout this whole Magic Quadrant are the fundamental dichotomies of the market, like IT Operations vs. developer buyers, new applications vs. existing workloads, “virtualization plus” vs. the fundamental move towards programmatic infrastructure, and so forth. We’ve tried hard to focus on a pragmatic view of the immediate wants and needs of Gartner clients, which also reflect these dichotomies.

This is a Magic Quadrant unlike the ones we have historically done in our services research; it is focused upon capabilities and features, in a manner that is much more comparable to the way that we compare software companies, than it is to things like network services or managed hosting or data center outsourcing. This reflects that public cloud IaaS goes far beyond just self-service VMs, creating significant disparities in provider capabilities.

In fact, for this Magic Quadrant, we tried just about every provider hands-on, which is highly unusual for Gartner’s evaluation approach. However, because Gartner’s general philosophy isn’t to do the kind of lab evaluations that we consider to be the domain of journalists, the hands-on stuff was primarily to confirm that providers had particular features and the specifics of what they had, without having to constantly pepper them with questions. Consequently this also involved in reading a lot of documentation, community forums, etc. This wasn’t full-fledged serious trialing. (The expense of the trials was paid on my personal credit card. Fortunately, since this was the cloud, it amounted to less than $150 all told.)

However, like all Magic Quadrants, there’s a heavy emphasis on business factors and not just technology — we are evaluating the positions of companies in the market, which are a composite of many things not directly related to comparable functionality of the services.

Like other Magic Quadrants, this one is targeted at the typical Gartner client — a mid-market company or an enterprise, but also our many tech company clients who range from tiny start-ups to huge monoliths. We believe that cloud IaaS, including the public cloud, is being used to run not only new applications, but also existing workloads. We don’t believe that public cloud IaaS is only for apps written specifically for the cloud, and we certainly don’t believe that it’s only for start-ups or leading-edge companies. It’s a nascent market, yes, but companies can use it productively today as long as they’re thoughtful about their use cases and deployment approach. We also don’t believe that cloud IaaS is solely the province of mass-scale providers; multi-tenancy can be cost-effectively delivered on a relatively small scale, as long as most of the workloads are steady-state (which legacy workloads often are).

Service features, sales, and marketing are all impacted by the need to serve two different buying constituencies, IT Operations and developers. Because we believe that developers are the face of business buyers, though, we believe that addressing this audience is just as important as it is addressing the traditional IT Operations audience. We do, however, emphasize a fundamentally corporate audience — this is definitely not an MQ aimed at, say, an individual building an iPhone app, or even non-technology small businesses.

Nowhere are those dichotomies better illustrated than two of the Leaders in this MQ — Amazon Web Services and CSC. Amazon excels at addressing a developer audience and new applications; CSC excels at addressing a mid-market IT Operations audience on the path towards data center transformation and automation of IT operations management, by migrating to cloud IaaS. Both companies address audiences and use cases beyond that expertise, of course, but they have enormously different visions of their fundamental value proposition, that are both valid. (For those of you who are going, “CSC? Really?” — yes, really. And they’ve been quietly growing far faster than any other VMware-based provider, so for all you vendors out there, if they’re not on your competitive radar screen, they should be.)

Of course, this means that no single provider in the Magic Quadrant is a fantastic fit for all needs. Furthermore, the right provider is always dependent upon not just the actual technical needs, but also the business needs and corporate culture, like the way that the company likes to engage with its vendors, its appetite for risk, and its viewpoint on strategic vs. tactical vendors.

Gartner has asked its analysts not to debate published research in public (per our updated Public Web Participation policy), especially Magic Quadrants. Consequently, I’m willing to engage in a certain amount of conversation about this MQ in public, but I’m not going to get into the kinds of public debates that I got into last year.

If you have questions about the MQ or are looking for more detail than is in the text itself, I’m happy to discuss. If you’re a Gartner client, please schedule an inquiry. If you’re a journalist, please arrange a call through Gartner’s press office. Depending on the circumstances, I may also consider a discussion in email.

This was a fascinating Magic Quadrant to research and write, and within the limits of that “no public debates” restriction, I may end up blogging more about it in the future. Also, as this is a fast-moving market, we’re highly likely to target an update for the middle of next year.

First and foremost, we’re looking for an analyst to cover the colocation market, and preferably also data center leasing. Someone who knows one or more other adjacent spaces as well would be great — peering, IP transit, hosting, cloud IaaS, content delivery networks, network services, etc.

We could also use an analyst who can cover some of the things that I cover — cloud IaaS, managed hosting, CDNs, and general Internet topics (managed DNS, domain registration, peering, and so on).

These positions will primarily serve North American clients, but we don’t care where you’re located as long as you can accomodate normal US time zones; these positions are work-from-home.

I love my job. You’ve got to have the right set of personality traits to enjoy it, but if the following five things sound awesome to you, you should come work at Gartner:

1. It is an unbeatably interesting job for people who thrive on input. You will spend your days talking to IT people from an incredibly diverse array of businesses around the globe, who all have different stories to tell about their environments and needs. Vendors will tell you about the cool stuff that they’re doing. You will be encouraged to inhale as much information as you can, reading and researching on your own. You will have one-on-one meetings with hundreds of clients each year (our busiest analysts do over 1,500 one-on-one interactions!), and get to meet countless more in informal interactions. Many of the people you talk to will make you smarter, and all of them will make you more knowledgeable.

2. You get to help people in bite-sized chunks. People will tell you their problems and you will try your best to help them in thirty minutes. After those thirty minutes, their problem is no longer yours; they’re the ones who are going to have to go back and fight through their politics and tangled snarl of systems to get things done. It’s hugely satisfying if you enjoy that kind of thing, especially since you do often get long-term feedback about how much you helped them. You’ll help IT buyer clients choose the right strategy, pick the right vendors, and save tons of money by smart contract negotiation. You’ll help vendors with their strategy, design better products, understand the competition, and serve their customers better. You’ll help investors understand markets and companies and trends, which translates directly into helping them make money. Hopefully, you’ll get to influence the market in a way that’s good for everyone.

3. You get to work with great colleagues. Analysts here are smart and self-motivated. There’s no real hierarchy; we work collaboratively and as equals, regardless of our titles, with ad-hoc leadership as needed. Also, analysts are articulate, witty, and opinionated, which always makes for fun interactions. Your colleagues will routinely provide you with new insights, challenge your thinking, and provide amazing amounts of expertise in all kinds of things. There’s almost always someone who is deeply expert in whatever you want to talk about. Analysts are Gartner’s real product; research and events are a result of the people. Our turnover is extremely low.

4. Your work is self-directed. Nobody tells you what to do here beyond some general priorities and goals; there’s very little management. You’re expected to figure out what you need to do with some guidance from your manager and input from your peers, manage your time accordingly, and go do it. You mostly get to figure out how to cover your market, and aim towards what clients are interested in. Your research agenda and coverage are flexible, and you can expand into whatever you can be expert in. You set your own working hours. Most people work from home.

5. We don’t do any pay-for-play. Integrity is a core value at Gartner, so you won’t be selling your soul. About 80% of our revenue comes from IT buyers, not vendors. Unlike most other analyst firms, we don’t do commissioned white papers, or anything else that could be perceived as an endorsement of a vendor; also, unlike some other analyst firms, analysts don’t have any sales responsibility for bringing in vendor sales or consulting engagements, or being quoted in press releases, etc. You will neither need to know nor care which vendors are clients or what they’re paying (any vendor can do briefings, though only clients get inquiry). Analysts must be unbiased, and management fiercely defends your right to write and say anything you want, as long as it’s backed up by solid evidence and is presented professionally, no matter how upset it makes a vendor. (Important downside: We don’t allow side work like participation in expert nets, and we don’t allow you or your immediate family to have any financial interest in the areas you cover, including employment or stock ownership in related companies. If your spouse works in tech, this can be a serious limiter.)

Poke me if you’re interested. I have a keen interest in seeing great people hired into these roles fast, since they’re going to be taking a big chunk of my current workload.

Even providers who are clear in their marketing material that the offering is a public, multi-tenant cloud IaaS, sometimes have salespeople who pitch the offering as private cloud. We also find that customers are sometimes under the illusion that they’ve bought a private cloud, even when they haven’t.

I’ve seen three common variants of provider rationalization for why they are misleadingly labeling a multi-tenant cloud IaaS as “private cloud”:

We use a shared resource pool model. These providers claim that because customers buy by the resource pool allocation (for instance, “100 vCPUs and 200 GB of RAM”) and can carve that capacity up into VMs as they choose, that capacity is therefore “private”, even though the infrastructure is fully multi-tenant. However, there is always still contention for these resources (even if neither the provider nor the customer deliberately oversubscribes capacity), as well as any other shared elements, like storage and networking. It also doesn’t alter any of the risks of multi-tenancy. In short, a shared resource pool, versus a pay-by-the-VM model, is largely just a matter of the billing scheme and management convenience, possibly including the nice feature of allowing the customer to voluntarily self-oversubscribe his purchased resources. It’s certainly not private. (This is probably the situation that customers most commonly confuse as “private”, even after long experience with the service — a non-trivial number of them think the shared resource pool is physically carved off for them.)

Our customers don’t connect to us over the Internet. These providers claim that private networking makes them a private cloud. But in fact, nearly all cloud IaaS providers offer multiple networking options other than plain old Internet, ranging from IPsec VPN over the Internet to a variety of private connectivity options from the carrier of your choice (MPLS, Ethernet, etc.). This has been true for years, now, as I noted when I wrote about Amazon’s introduction of VPC back in 2009. Even Amazon essentially offers private connectivity these days, since you can use Amazon Direct Connect to get a cross-connect at select Equinix data centers, and from there, buy any connectivity that you wish.

We don’t allow everyone to use our cloud, so we’re not really “public”. These providers claim to have a “private cloud” because they vet their customers and only allow “real businesses”, however they define that. (The ones who exclude net-native companies as not being “real businesses” make me cringe.) They claim that a “public cloud” would allow anyone to sign up, and it would be an uncontrolled environment. This is hogwash. It can also lead to a false sense of complacency, as I’ve written before — the assumption that their customers are good guys means that they might not adequately defend against customer compromises or customer employees who go rogue.

The NIST definition of private cloud is clear: “Private cloud. The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers (e.g., business units). It may be owned, managed, and operated by the organization, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises.” In other words, NIST defines private cloud as single-tenant.

Given the widespread use of NIST cloud definitions, and the reasonable expectation that customers have that a provider’s terminology for its offering will conform to those definitions, calling a multi-tenant offering “private cloud” is misleading at best. And at some point in time, the provider is going to have to fess up to the customer.

I do fully acknowledge that by claiming private cloud, a provider will get customers into the buying cycle that they wouldn’t have gotten if they admitted multi-tenancy. Bait-and-switch is unpleasant, though, and given that trust is a key component of provider relationships as businesses move into the cloud, customers should use providers that are clear and up-front about their architecture, so that they can make an accurate risk assessment.

Maintenance reboots are not new on Amazon, and are detailed on Amazon’s documentation about scheduled maintenance. The required reboots this time are instance reboots, which are easily accomplished — just point-and-click to reboot on your own schedule rather than Amazon’s (although you cannot delay past the scheduled reboot). Importantly, instance reboots do not result in a change of IP address nor do they erase the data in instance storage (which is normally non-persistent).

For some customers, of course, a reboot represents a headache, and it results in several minutes of downtime for that instance. Also, since this is peak retail season, it is already a sensitive, heavy-traffic time for many businesses, so the timing of this widespread maintenance is problematic for many customers.

However, cloud IaaS isn’t magical. If these customers were using dedicated hosting, they would still be subject to mandated reboots for security patches — hosting providers generally offer some flexibility on scheduling such reboots, but not aa lot (and sometimes none at all if there’s an exploit in the wild). If these customers were using a provider that uses live migration technology (like VMotion on a VMware-virtualized cloud), they might be spared reboots for system reasons, but they might still be subject to reboots for mandated operating system patches.

Given that what’s underlying EC2 are ordinary physical servers running virtualization without a live migration technology in use, customers should reasonably expect that they will be subject to reboots — server-level (what Amazon calls a system reboot), as well as instance-level — and also anticipate that they may sometimes need to reboot for their own guest OS patches and the like (assuming that they don’t simply patch their AMIs and re-launch their instances, arguably a more “cloudy” way to approach this problem).

What makes this rolling scheduled maintenance remarkable is its sheer scale. Hosting providers typically have a few hundred customers and a few thousand servers. Mass-market VPS hosters have lots of VPS containers, but there’s a roughly 1:1 VPS:customer ratio and a small-business-centricity that doesn’t lead to this kind of hullabaloo. Amazon’s largest competitor is estimated to be around the 100,000 VM mark. Only the largest cloud IaaS providers have more than 2,000 VMs. Consequently, this involves a virtually unprecedented number of customers and mission-critical systems.

Amazon has actually been very good about not taking down its cloud customers for extended maintenance windows. (I can think of one major Amazon competitor that took down one whole data center for an eight-hour maintenence evidently involving a total outage this past weekend, and which regularly has long-downtime maintenance windows in general.) A reboot is an inconvenience, but if you are running production infrastructure, you should darn well think about how to handle the occasional reboot, including reboots that affect a significant percentage of your infrastructure, because reboots are not likely to go away in IaaS anytime soon.

To hammer on the point again: Cloud IaaS is not magical. It still requires management, and it still has some of the foibles of both physical servers and non-cloud virtualization. Being able to push a button and get infrastructure is nice, but the responsibility to manage that infrastructure doesn’t go away — it’s just that many cloud customers manage to delay the day of reckoning when the attention they haven’t paid to management comes back to bite them.

If you run infrastructure, regardless of whether it’s in your own data center, in hosting, or in cloud IaaS, you should have a plan for “what happens if I need to mass-reboot my servers?” because it is something that will happen. And add “what if I have to do that immediately?” to the list, because that is also something that will happen, because mass exploits and worms certainly have not gone away.

(Gartner clients only: Check out a note by my security colleagues, “Address Concentration Risk in Public Cloud Deployments and Shared-Service Delivery Models to Avoid Unacceptable Losses“.)

However, cloud IaaS providers today have to deal with two different constituencies — developers (developers are the face of business buyers) and IT Operations. These two groups have different priorities and needs, and sometimes even different use cases for the cloud.

IaaS providers may be inclined to cater heavily towards one group or the other, and selectively add features that are critical to the other group, in order to ease buying frictions. Others may decide to try to appeal to both — a strategy likely to be available only to those with a lot of engineering resources at their disposal. Over time (years), there will be convergence in the market, as all providers reach a certain degree of feature parity on the critical bits, and then differentiation will be on smaller bits of creeping featurism.

Take a feature like role-based access control (RBAC). For the needs of a typical business buyer — where the developers are running the show on a project basis — RBAC is mostly a matter of roles on the development team, likely in a fairly minimalistic way, but fine-grained security may be desired on API keys so that any script’s access to the API is strictly limited to just what that script needs to do. For IT Operations, though, RBAC needs tend to get blown out into full-fledged lab management — having to manage a large population of users (many of them individual developers) who need access to their own pools of infrastructure and who want to be segregated from one another.

Some providers like to think of the business buyer vs. IT Operations buyer split as a “new applications” vs. “legacy applications” split instead. I think there’s an element of truth to that, but it’s often articulated as “commodity components that you can self-assemble if you’re smart enough to know how to architect for the cloud” vs. “expensive enterprise-class gear providing a safe familiar environment”. This latter distinction will become less and less relevant as an increasing number of providers offer multi-tiered infrastructure at different price points within the same cloud. Similarly, the “new vs. legacy apps” distinction will fade with feature-set convergence — a broad-appeal cloud IaaS offering should be able to support either type of workload.

But the buying constituencies themselves will remain split. The business and IT will continue to have different priorities, despite the best efforts of IT to try to align itself closer to what the business needs.

I disagree entirely, and I think Domage’s comments ignore the reality of what is going on within enterprises, both in terms of their internal private cloud initiatives, as well as their adoption of public cloud IaaS. (I assume Domage’s commentary is intended to be specific to infrastructure, or it would be purely nonsensical.)

While not all IaaS providers build to the same security standards, nearly all build a high degree of security into their offering. Furthermore, end-to-end encryption, which Domage claims is unavailable in public cloud IaaS, is available in multiple offerings today, presuming that it refers to both end-to-end network encryption, along with encryption of both storage in motion and storage at rest. (Obviously, computation has to occur either on unencrypted data, or your app has to treat encrypted data like a passthrough.)

And for the truly paranoid, you can adopt something like Harris Trusted Cloud — private or public cloud IaaS built with security and compliance as the first priority, where each and every component is checked for validity. (Wyatt Starnes, the guiding brain behind this, founded Tripwire, so you can guess where the thinking comes from.) Find me an enterprise that takes security to that level today.

I’ve found that the bigger the company, the more likely they are to have already adopted public cloud IaaS. Yes, it’s tactical, but their businesses are moving faster than they can deploy private clouds, and the workloads they have in the public cloud are growing every day. Yes, they’ll also build a private cloud (or in many cases, already have), but they’ll use both.

The idea that the enterprise cloud is “locked down and totally managed” is a fantasy. Not only do many enterprises struggle with managing the security within private clouds, many of them have practically surrendered control to the restless natives (developers) who are deploying VMs within that environment. They’re struggling with basic governance, and often haven’t extended their enterprise IT operations management systems successfully into that private cloud. (Assuming, as the article seems to imply, that private cloud is being used to refer to self-service IaaS, not merely virtualized infrastructure.)

The head-in-the-sand “la la la public cloud is too insecure to adopt, only I can build something good enough” position will only make an enterprise IT manager sound clueless and out of touch both with reality and with the needs of the business.

Organizations certainly have to do their due diligence — hopefully before, and not after, the business is asking what cloud infrastructure solutions can be used right this instant. But the prudent thing to do is to build expertise with public cloud (or hosted private cloud), and for organizations which intend to continue running data centers long-term, simultaneously building out a private cloud.

If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google.

For an email sent to Joe Random Consumer, it’s remarkably clueless as to what consumers actually can comprehend. Grandma is highly unlikely to understand what the heck that means.

Tip for everyone offering a product or service to consumers: Any communication with consumers about that product or service should be in language that Grandma can understand.

While Gartner serves pretty much the entire technology industry, and consequently I talk to plenty of folks at little start-ups and whatnot, our bread-and-butter client — 80% of Gartner’s revenue — comes from “end-users”, which means IT management at mid-market businesses and enterprise.

Over the years, I have learned a lot of important things about dealing with clients. One of them is that they generally aren’t really interested in best practices. They find best practices fascinating, but they frequently can’t put them to use in their own organizations. They’re actually interested in good practices — things that several other organizations like them have done successfully and which are practically applicable to their own environment.

More broadly, there’s a reason that analysts are still in business — people need advice that’s tailored to their particular needs. You know the Tolstoy line “Happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” that starts Anna Karenina? Well, every corporate IT department has its own unique pathology. There are the constraints of the business (real and imagined) and the corporate culture, the culture in IT specifically, the existing IT environment in all of its broken glory and layers of legacy, the available budget and resources and skills (modified by whether or not they are willing to hire consultants and other outside help), the people and personalities and pet peeves and personal ambitions, and even the way that they like to deal with analysts. (Right down to the fact that some clients have openly said that they don’t like a woman telling them what to do.)

To be a successful advisor, you have to recognize that most people can’t aim for the “ideal” solution. They have to find a solution that will work for their particular circumstances, with all of the limitations of it — some admittedly self-imposed, but nevertheless important. You can start by articulating an ideal, but it has to quickly come down to earth.

But cloud computing has turned out to be an extra-special set of landmines. When clients come to me wanting to do a “cloud computing” or “cloud infrastructure” project, especially if they don’t have a specific thing in mind, I’ve learned to ask, “Why are you doing this?” Is this client reluctant, pushed into doing this only because someone higher-up is demanding that they do ‘something in the cloud’? Is this client genuinely interested in seeing this project succeed, or would he rather it fail? Does he want to put real effort into it, or just a token? Is he trying to create a proof of concept that he can build upon, or is this a one-shot effort? Is he doing this for career reasons? Does he hope to get his name in the press or be the subject of a case study? What are the constraints of his industry, his business, his environment, and his organization?

My answer to, “What should I do?” varies based on these factors, and I explain my reasoning to the client. My job is not to give academic theoretical answers — my job is to offer advice that will work for this client in his current circumstances, even if I think it’s directionally wrong for the organization in the long term. (I try to shake clients out of their complacency, but in the end, I’m just trying to leave them with something to think about, so they understand the implications of their decisions, and how clinging to the way things are now will have business ramfiications over the long term.) However, not-infrequently, my job involves helping a deeply reluctant client think of some token project that he can put on cloud infrastructure so he can tell his CEO/CFO/CIO that he’s done it.

Cloud providers dealing with traditional corporate IT should keep in mind that not everyone who inquires about their service has a genuine desire for the project to be a success — and even those who are hoping for success don’t necessarily have pure motivations.

There were countless IT people on this phone consultation, and I’d received a dizzying introducing to names and titles and job functions, but not one person in the room was someone who did real work, i.e., someone who wrote code or managed systems or gathered requirements from the business, or even did higher-level architecture. These weren’t even people who had direct management responsibility for people who did real work. They were part of the diffuse cloud of people who are in charge of the general principle of getting something done eventually, that you find everywhere in most large organizations (IT or not).

I said, “If you’re going to operate like a cloud provider, you will need to be willing to fire almost everyone in this room.”

That got their attention. By the time I’d spent half an hour explaining to them what a cloud provider’s organization looks like, they had decidedly lost their enthusiasm for the concept, as well as been poleaxed by the fundamental transformations they would have to make in their approach to IT.

Another large enterprise client recently asked me to explain Rackspace’s organization to them. They wanted to transform their internal IT to resemble a hosting company’s, and Rackspace, with its high degree of customer satisfaction and reputation for being a good place to work, seemed like an ideal model to them. So I spent some time explaining the way that hosting companies organize, and how Rackspace in particular does — in a very flat, matrix-managed way, with horizontally-integrated teams that service a customer group in a holistic manner, coupled with some shared-services groups.

A few days later, the client asked me for a follow-up call. They said, “We’ve been thinking about what you’ve said, and have drawn out the org… and we’re wondering, where’s all the management?”

I said, “There isn’t any more management. That’s all there is.” (The very flat organization means responsibility pushed down to team leads who also serve functional roles, a modest number of managers, and a very small number of directors who have very big organizations.)

The client said, “Well, without a lot of management, where’s the career path in our organization? We can’t do something like this!”

Large enteprise IT organizations are almost always full of inertia. Many mid-market IT organizations are as well. In fact, the ones that make me twitch the most are the mid-market IT directors who are actually doing a great job with managing their infrastructure — but constrained by their scale, they are usually just good for their size and not awesome on the general scale of things, but are doing well enough to resist change that would shake things up.

Business, though, is increasingly on a wartime footing — and the business is pressuring IT, usually in the form of the development organization, to get more things done and to get them done faster. And this is where the dissonance really gets highlighted.

A while back, one of my clients told me about an interesting approach they were trying. They had a legacy data center that was a general mess of stuff. And they had a brand-new, shiny data center with a stringent set of rules for applications and infrastructure. You could only deploy into the new shiny data center if you followed the rules, which gave people an incentive to toe the line, and generally ensured that anything new would be cleanly deployed and maintained in a standardized manner.

It makes me wonder about the viability of an experiment for large enterprise IT with serious inertia problems: Start a fresh new environment with a new philosophy, perhaps a devops philosophy, with all the joy of having a greenfield deployment, and simply begin deploying new applications into it. Leave legacy IT with the mess, rather than letting the morass kill every new initiative that’s tried.

Although this is hampered by one serious problem: IT superstars rarely go to work in enterprises (excepting certain places, like some corners of financial services), and they especially don’t go to work in organizations with inertia problems.

There are many, many other providers out there who are offering cloud IaaS, but Amazon is the brand that people know. They created this market; they have remained synonymous with it.

That means that for many organizations that are only now beginning to adopt cloud IaaS (i.e., traditional businesses that already run their own data centers), Amazon is the default choice. It’s the provider that everyone looks at because they’re big — and because they’re #1, they’re increasingly perceived as a safe choice. And because Amazon makes it superbly easy to sign up and get started (and get started for free, if you’re just monkeying around), there’s no reason not to give them a whirl.

Default choices are phenomenally powerful. (You can read any number of scientific papers and books about this.) Many businesses believe that they’ve got a low-risk project that they can toss on cloud IaaS and see what happens next. Or they’ve got an instant need and no time to review all the options, so they simply do something, because it’s better than not doing something (assuming that the organization is one in which people who get things done are not punished for not having filled out a form in triplicate first).

Default choices are often followed by inertia. Yeah, the company put a project on Amazon. It’s running fine, so people figure, why mess with it? They’ve got this larger internal private cloud story they’re working on, or this other larger cloud IaaS deal they’re working on, but… well, they figure, they can migrate stuff later. And it’s absolutely true that people can and do migrate, or in many cases, build a private cloud or add another cloud IaaS provider, but a high enough percentage of the time, whatever they stuck out there remains at Amazon, and possibly begins to accrete other stuff.

This is increasingly leaving the rest of the market trying to pry customers away from a provider they’re already using. It’s absolutely true that Amazon is not the ideal provider for all use cases. It’s absolutely true that any number of service providers can tell me endless stories of customers who have left Amazon for them. It’s probably true, as many service providers claim, that customers who are experienced with Amazon are better educated about the cloud and their needs, and therefore become better consumers of their next cloud provider.

But it does not change the fact that Amazon has been working on conquering the market one developer at a time, and that in turn has become the bean-counters in business saying, hey, shouldn’t we be using these Amazon guys?

This is what every vendor wants: For the dude at the customer to be trying to explain to his boss why he’s not using them.

This is increasingly my client inquiry pattern: Client has decided they are definitively not using Amazon (for various reasons, sometimes emotional and sometimes well thought out) and are looking at other options, or they are looking at cloud IaaS and are figuring that they’ll probably use Amazon or have even actually deployed stuff on Amazon (even if they have done zero reading or evaluation). Two extremes.