Last week, I attended an event sponsored by SDForum on Cloud Computing called "Cloud Computing and Beyond: The Web Grows Up (finally)"   For me, being a Cloud Computing provider myself, I expected the highlight of the event to be James Staten's opening keynote address on trends in Cloud Computing (you can find the slides here .)  And, it didn't disappoint: James's usual gift for clearly summarizing trends and futures made for an interesting talk. 

However, the highlight of the event for me turned out to be the panel on users' views of Utility Computing.  Given the nature of the audience - mostly tech-savvy software entrepreneurs - I expected a great deal of details about how these companies were using Cloud Computing.   What found out was that most of them are customers of Amazon's EC2 service, and what I heard instead of technical details was their strategies for mitigating the risks of dealing with Amazon.   Each of the companies using EC2 had developed intense internal expertise on Amazon's service.  That's right, you read correctly: on Amazon's service.  Not on Cloud Computing in general (though there are those who argue that EC2 and Cloud Computing are the same thing) but rather on the intricate technical and organizational details of dealing with Amazon and its service as well as optimizing their use of it.

It wasn't a surprise to me that these companies, dependent on Amazon for their success, would get to know the service well.  What did surprise me was the lengths to which they went to mitigate the risks.   Generally, if you have doubts or fears about something, you want to learn all you can about it.  These companies showed incredible technical depth at understanding EC2's characteristics and peccadillos.  They asserted that it was critical to their success.   But this seems to me to be in direct conflict with the ideal of Cloud Computing, which is the democratization of information technology; in other words, lowering the barriers of entry.   I think this is an admission that Cloud Computing technology in any form is still not polished enough for completely casual use.  At ENKI, we realized this early on and decided to strive to be the "onramp to the Cloud" by providing all the services necessary to use our cloud without having to know anything about Cloud Computing.  In fact, we have customers - software startups, generally - who don't even have any technical people on salary.   We - with their outsourced development team - just take care of all that for them.  Naturally, there is a labor cost to that, but it's certainly less than hiring dedicated Cloud Computing Experts to manage your cloud provider.   

It has been said that you should keep your enemies close to you.  The idea is, that way you'll know what they're doing so they can't hurt you.   These companies have taken a similar approach to dealing with Amazon.  Each of them admitted to having high-level contact with Amazon's management and knowing the management hierarchy at Amazon well.  They felt this was critical to their success.  However, Amazon doesn't even answer the phone for their regular customers, so how can the average entrepreneur expect to use EC2 successfully?   Fortunately, there are third parties out there that simplify the interface to EC2, but yet these successful startups had instead chosen to take the extreme step of building a personal relationship with Amazon.   At ENKI this comes naturally since our value proposition is to build a partnership with our customer that automatically builds the personal connections.  

Each of the panelists underscored the need for trust between cloud vendors and customers and pointed out that a great deal more transparency was necessary if that trust was going to develop successfully. I think the trust is key, because as the panelists illustrated, the cloud vendor becomes part of their customers' value delivery system - a role that traditionally was kept in-house (at much greater cost, of course.)   Putting myself in the cloud vendors' shoes (!) I can understand the barriers to transparency, which include such necessities as hiding the internal technology used to deliver the cloud services in order to maintain its security for all users.  (I've had $45 a month customers demand to get a tour of our data centers!)  And then there's always the software engineer's number one Achilles' Heel, which is lack of modesty: it's hard to say "I don't know" when a customer asks you a question - after all, you want to look like you know what you're doing!  Yet, these and other barriers will need to be overcome if Cloud Computing is going to move forward smoothly.  The cost savings from shared infrastructure that it offers are drawing in lots of customers, but the trust between customers and vendors must be cultivated if the revolution is to move beyond the casual user and SMB space into the mission critical enterprise market.

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