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Is Cloud Computing still Cloudy?

Over the past few weeks I’ve been quite tied up with [continued] research into cloud computing services, architectures, vitualization, business models, opportunities, market trends and more. I’ve also been quite busy figuring out how to utilize the press and marketing more effectively for building our brand and getting our message out there.  Consequently, I’ve also been far more in tune with what vendors and other IT organizations are ‘punting’ under the cloud computing banner.

Through this process I realized that there has been a significant increase in quality and quantity of material on the subject over the past 12 months. Last year this time, it seemed like the world had just woken up to Cloud Computing. Large vendors had nothing to offer – yet.  They had marketing messages, but nothing with which to substantiate them.  Vendors were scrambling (in a mad panic) to get their solutions ported to some cloud derivative. At the same time they were trying desperately to muddy the water, knowing good and well (or perhaps not!) that their cloud solutions were not really fitting into the massively scalable “cloud computing” paradigm as defined by Gartner et al. Instead, they were creating some half-baked managed service offering using the same legacy solutions they had purchased (for millions or billions of dollars) but for which they failed to retain the critical skills that helped create the solutions in the first place.

Now I can’t quite figure out if they actually succeeded in muddying the waters or if the paradigm has always been as broad as it is. Virtually every service out there today is being re-branded with “as a Service” suffix to take advantage of the cloud computing SaaS, PaaS and IaaS acronyms.  I’ve even seen in-sourcing type services taking advantage of the hype.

Now I’m not saying they don’t meet some of the requirements to qualify as cloud services, but I certainly question whether these solutions meet the fundamental scalability requirement. Let’s take “Testing as a Service” (TaaS) for example. I honestly can’t see how its ‘right’ to market a service which is very human resource dependent as a cloud service and categorize it in the same way as Software as a Service (SaaS).  In theory, SaaS solutions are able to scale ‘massively’ in a matter of hours or minutes.  Now – unless you can clone human resources overnight, I recon you have a problem meeting this paradigm objective with TaaS.

Sure, TaaS is still a service and is being offered remotely via the Internet, but does that qualify it as a cloud service?   Cloud services in my book are services offered using a cloud computing platform (although that would be contested by many), I believe TaaS is mostly an outsourced solution using licensed products such as HP quality centre and the like and actually has nothing to do with cloud computing.

With that long digression, I get back to my topic… Is cloud computing a bit cloudy?  I think the the answer depends on your source of information.  If you are specific about who’s message you believe, the answer is NO, but if you trust the general marketing messages out there, the answer will have to be YES.   Research organizations such as Gartner, Forrester, etc have very clear and effective definitions for cloud computing, but vendors, resellers and even integrators that don’t have clear understanding of what it is but want score on all the hype have done well to sow confusion.

Consider this: how many times have you heard or read opening statements like “everyone seems to have a different definition of cloud computing”?    I say  be wary – half of those statements are made by people who don’t have the foggiest idea (intended pun) of what cloud computing actually is all about. They are ten to one lost between the hype, false marketing, vendor influence, and misinformation from a host of other lost souls.

Vendors and service providers that woke up to cloud computing idea too late to have their own true cloud offering, have IMHO actually succeeded in branding quasi-cloud based services as cloud computing.  Some have even succeeded in convincing the world of their points of view, all in the interest of protecting their own sales figures from taking a dive.

So, perhaps the final answer to my question is a vague ‘maybe’.  Although i have a clear vision and understanding of Cloud Computing and the associated services, the waters have been muddied. The general tech-savvy person out there has finally figured out what it all means, well, kind-of, depending on the source of information.

Clear as mud.