Mistakes made by cloud vendors… (insight #3)

David Linthicum wrote a great article on Infoworld’s Cloud Computing blog entitled “The top 5 mistakes cloud vendors make – and what you should watch for“.  It’s a long title, agreed, but its a great read – and not too long at that.

For the impatient and execs that don’t have 10 minutes to spare, here are the 5 points summarized:

1. Not focusing on API’s:  API’s are critical for adoption in the enterprise and shouldn’t be an afterthought.
2. No integration strategy:  Don’t treat integration as a bad word to be dealt with by the consultancy team.  Have a strategy that will enable customers to do it themselves.
3. Outage defensiveness:  As a service provider, don’t be naive and think you won’t ever have downtime.  And don’t go on the defensive when you do.
4. Confusing SLAs:  Lawyers tend to set these up – make sure they can talk English.
5. Spinning standards:  Don’t just talk and write about standards – make sure they’re implemented.

Looking at these points objectively, I think that David got it right.   In the same way that traditional software vendors out there are rushing to put forward their cloud computing alternatives (generally cloud-washed implementations of exactly the same stuff they sold before), both traditional software vendors and ‘pure’ cloud vendors that are making these mistakes seem to be all over the place.  The ones not making these mistakes are making huge strides into the enterprise market.

That being said – it’s easy to talk and criticize – but we’re also selling cloud computing solutions – and I have to admit that we don’t always get it right either.  But what I can say, is that when our solutions have shortcomings, we feel it our obligation to highlight these, as our integrity is more important to us than the deals we may lose by being honest.