9:05 PM Service providers and large customers are deploying cloud services but avoiding calling them 'cloud services.' And the point is?

May 22, 2012

1 Min Read
The Cloud Backlash

9:10 PM -- DUBLIN -- Management World 2012 -- Has cloud already lost its cachet?

Two significant speakers at Tuesday's Profiting From Cloud Services Summit admitted right up front that while their companies are using or offering cloud services, they have abandoned the term "cloud."

Jon Waldron, general manager of IT Engineering for Commonwealth Bank of Australia, is an enthusiastic backer of cloud. In fact, his company has a "cloud first" strategy, which uses any technology refresh as an opportunity to push more apps and data into its growing hybrid cloud infrastructure.

But internally, Waldron says, "We don't use the word cloud, because it means too many different things to different people."

Similarly, Juan Antonio Sánchez Cañibano, director of IaaS Services for Telefonica Digital, says his company, the new business services spinoff of Telefonica, is delivering infrastructure as a service today and developing other cloud offerings. But they are quite deliberately not using the word "cloud" internally for them.

Add to this the fact that today's CIO panel, featuring top technologists from Telefonica O2, Vodafone Group plc (NYSE: VOD) and BT Global Services , failed to even mention cloud, and I have to wonder if this telecom world has grown weary of discussing cloud even as rolling out these new services remains a priority.

And if you are avoiding identifying your new service offerings as "cloud", what are you calling them?

— Carol Wilson, Chief Editor, Events, Light Reading

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