Quest for the Cloud

If there ever was a “Buzzword Bingo” for technology (feel free to substitute Buzzword with another commonly played type of bingo that starts with “B”…), the center square that you get for free would have the word “cloud” deeply etched into the card.  Even if it didn’t, it is very likely that “cloud” would be the first square called out at the beginning of the game anyways. The danger is that other seemingly simple words can quickly become part of this game, and as some people say: “It’s all a lot of fun until someone gets hurt”.

If you look at diagrams as old as the Internet itself, you will see network diagrams that focus on-premise topologies in a corporate network and depict all systems outside the corporate firewall as a big fluffy cloud.  This was very convenient because actually defining what was in that cloud was unnecessary – the goal was to show internal traffic and graphically show  how the other systems are “out there” and have limited, usually one-way communication with the enterprise.

Flash forward to present day where SaaS solutions are hitting their stride into the mainstream:  Our diagrams today focus on what exactly is in that cloud and how that cloud talks to a (hopefully) infinite number of customers.  So what started out as a convenient way of showing “all the systems outside our network” as a fluffy, nebulous icon has now become an industry term that describes real physical assets that generates a significant amount of hype and confusion.

Cloudwashing

If you say “cloud computing” to 10 people, you should expect at least 3-5 different definitions. Some may not even be able to describe it, but may give you examples such as Amazon,  Salesforce.com, and GMail.  To make these definitions more uniform, the industry has been settling into categories such as “Platform-as-a-service”, “Infrastructure-as-a-service”, and of course “Software-as-a-Service”. However even within those three categories, the definitions still vary widely.  

A large part of this ambiguity stems from ISVs and service providers that have warped the term “cloud” to mean whatever they want it to mean (usually based on what they already have –  called “Cloudwashing”).   The industry has seen everything from completely scalable single instance multi-tenant solutions down to traditional on-premise software that is just “hosted in the cloud”.   The rise of Salesforce.com has helped the industry standardize some elements of what “cloud” means in terms of SaaS, but there is still quite a bit of cloudwashing going on.

Taking Lumps: Enterprise Social Networking

Buzzword Bingo is already working on its next conquest: the term “Enterprise Social Computing” blurs the definition between what some would call a “corporate Facebook” tool and true productivity tools that aid enterprises in real collaboration, decision-making, and information sharing.  Now anything from Google Wave to Microsoft SharePoint to SAP 12sprints.com and everything in between gets lumped together as enterprise social tools.

(Disclaimer: I work for SAP and work on the 12sprints.com product)

To give you an example of this “lumping”, take a look at this article at CMS Wire: http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/sap-betas-12sprintscom-a-google-wave-competitor-006187.php .  It’s true, there are many similarities between 12sprints.com and Google Wave, but these are solutions that are complementary and even present some very exciting integration opportunities.  However once users get their hands on 12sprints, they get a completely different appreciation of where we are heading. You can try it out yourself at http://beta.12sprints.com.

 A more recent article at mashable.com http://mashable.com/2010/02/03/12sprints/) took a deeper look which makes it very clear that 12sprints.com isn’t exactly like Google Wave, nor is it a “corporate FaceBook”.  The first article is not wrong per se, but it is amazing to see different expectations created when I talk to people who only saw the first article, and to those who only saw the second. Since “Enterprise Social Networking” is such an undefined term, both of these products are subject to spin by anyone with an Internet connection and a keyboard – whether the ISVs agrees with the positioning or not.

There is still quite a bit of variance between different products termed “Enterprise Social Networking”, so we’re not yet at where the term “cloud” is in terms of definition maturity.   It is highly likely that rather than a specific definition, the industry will settle on recognizing the type/category of product by how it resembles an existing archetype – for example, we have a better common understanding today about SaaS solutions because we understand the SalesForce.com model.   I expect that in 2010 successful products will drive the industry to break out social networking into different types of applications – i.e. instant messaging/chat, content sharing, structured collaboration, and collaborative decision-making. 

And the Next Square is….

I predict the next commonly used term to join the buzz-word party will be “appliances”.  There are some strong parallels with the examples above; however reducing appliances to a buzzword creates ambiguity that is simply not acceptable in an enterprise environment.  When it comes to what happens inside the firewall, it should be the customer rather than ISVs setting the stage for what appliances are and what problems they solve.