We (i.e., Heavy Reading) are now adding "mobile cloud" to the mix, just to make things a little more interesting. It's challenging enough when the industry needs to enlighten end-users about new technologies and services. The challenge becomes hugely difficult when the industry itself is confused. I agree that it's time to get our collective head out of the cloud and start communicating in clearer and less nebulous terms. I just hope it won't take four more years to get there.
Separately, I thought I would comment on the "rack in a closet" part of things. In fact, I run a couple of racks of gear in a closet and we built in power backup and got a TI for better cooling in the space. Not everything is like that but here is what I can tell you....it is a LOT cheaper than putting stuff in our data centers for non-mission critical items. And for our application (mail filtering/mail hosting/secure mail/mail archiving/mail continuity) it is a LOT cheaper for us to have the equipment in our data centers than it is in EC2/S3 (about 1/3rd the cost). And we use Equinix so it is not like we have el cheapo data centers.
The reason for the last is that our application does not allow effectively for the turn down of resources easily. That means that we would be renting Very Large Instances permanently (basically) to 1 for 1 replace our servers. Our biggest 2U servers go for about $4K from Dell. Go take a look at how long that gets you a Very Large Instance on EC2. Their pricing is online so go compare for yourself. The dowsides are that: I own the maintenance/depreciation/upgrade costs, I have to outlay up front capital, Scaling for me is not linear and takes a couple of weeks so I have to predict it by monitoring load (and have Sales tell me if they landed any big fish).
Well, even here we talk about a bunch of different things as "The Cloud". From what I have seen talked about as Cloud HERE are:
- Data Centers
- SaaS offerings
- Other xaaS offerings
- EC2/S3 and the like
- Mobile apps that use carrer APIs
The original meaning of cloud, I thought, had a lot to do with virtualized network based computing. Now as far as I can tell it means any compute resource inside the network including a website. I would stop selling "Cloud" and start selling business cases for specific capabilities.
I don't think SMBs are the only ones who are still a bit clueless on cloud. It's a vague term that's used in a wide array of confusing contexts. Maybe purposefully so.
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