Cloud is Hype

The Cloud is hyped up big time. Every conference has sessions titled Cloud. Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Cloud Communications, blah, blah, blah.

Except it isn't really hype. And it IS buzz that you should take advantage of.

You don't have to do anything but talk about your Cloud offerings. The marketplace has already been hammered with The Cloud is IT.

Let's face it: Cloud has been around a long time. It was just called The Internet or ARPA-Net or something else. Email lives in the cloud. Anti-spam and anti-virus are security services in the cloud.

Back in the ISPCON days, I sat through some boring sessions by Jamcracker, USi, and SalesForce talking about the ASP model. Well, it is here.

Ubiquitous broadband has certainly helped to bring it about. It was a chicken and egg thing, right? Which comes first the access or the apps? Well, access needed to come first. Then apps, because the killer app was email and that was easy even on dial-up (for most people).

Now with devices like the iPad and smartphones, people are online all the time. They want to access their data wherever they are. Welcome to Google Apps. If VPN was easy on devices, more people would just tunnel into their own server, but that just never seemed to take off. Neither did services to access your desktop remotely (in the consumer space). Again kind of cumbersome and it looked unsafe.

Even when you are selling broadband, you aren't. You are selling fast access to the websites that people want to view like Google, Facebook, and Zappos. You aren't selling DSL, you ARE selling access to the Cloud. Fast, reliable, safe access to the cloud. And then I would partner up with some apps companies and make some coin on Layer 7 too.

Off to New Orleans!