Cloud is over-hyped? No ... you don't say ...
By joe
- 2 minutes read - 358 wordsThere are some real nuggets of value in “the cloud”&tm; but as with “The Grid”&TM; there is a serious land grab underway, where everything is … er … cloudy. Yeah, thats a good phrase … cloudy. Though nebulous fits as well. And of course, clouds being water vapor … and often ice crystals … I couldn’t resist, my apologies. More seriously, some analyst houses are noticing the massive over-hyping.
Now I am not a great fan of Gartner. Their Itanium uptake predictions were … well … an inspired fiction at best. But their hype cycle estimates of various technologies here (the picture links back to their site)
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at least seems reasonable for some things. They talk about cloud computing nearing the peak of its hype. I think they may be optimistic. Clouds are being massively overhyped by most marketeers. This doesn’t mean there isn’t value in them. I am seeing people deploying real valuable applications into the cloud. Folks like Legalcloud are doing this. As are a number of others. The problem is, that for other vendors, who have neither a product that is well differentiated, nor marketeers who understand the real value proposition of “a cloud” you are getting everything being branded “cloud” ready. In all fairness, we have partners and customers, both on the user and provider side of these fences. We want them to have good experiences, and excellent support. My concern is that with the massive over-hyping, expectations are set way higher than they should be as to the capabilities of clouds, and the relative paucity of reports of problems. Oh, there are problems, there are issues, there are some things that would concern most everyone building a business dependency upon these. However, the sensible organizations will have plans and processes that they have tested in place to minimize pain. And that is, in my opinion, where the real value of the cloud is. It is abstracting away some of the lower levels of support, making those things more transparent. This is a good thing. They hype is almost too much and I fear it is going to get worse over time.