I’m looking forward to the discussion at OM’s Structure 09 tomorrow.  For fun I’ll be filtering and tweeting (@wattersjames) what people mean/imply when they talk about clouds. Vendors have a propensity to re-label instead of innovating .  Commentators (ex: @DavidLinthicum) have called them on it. But marketer’s are just doing their job, and  are able to be so murkey because customers don’t yet have a strong ideation of a cloud architecture.  A recent study found:

Almost half of IT professionals admit they don’t know what cloud computing is, according to a survey released today… the survey showed that 41 per cent of respondents don’t know what cloud computing is and 29 per cent don’t know if their company is using it or not.

A must have, but poorly delineated, new technology is a marketers’ dream. Even big vendor friendly Gartner stepped in this week to help shield clients from abusive marketing behavior by vendors in their cloud marketing:

Cloud computing services are defined by Gartner as being service-based, scalable and elastic, shared, metered by use, and delivered using Internet technologies.

Plummer said the Gartner definitions were important because there is widespread demand among organisations for greater clarity. “We are trying to clarify the definitions because nobody else is. We’ve even got companies like IBM saying there is no definition, and we don’t believe that’s true,” he said.

The most interesting requirement here is “delivered by Internet technologies.” This may force big vendors to innovate and shift their business models. Under this definition a hypervisor provisioning tool isn’t a ‘cloud’ appliance because clouds deliver their final ‘services’ through Internet technologies and completely obfuscate, instead of assist, complex provisioning tasks. The Map Reduce service on AWS simply asks you how many servers you would like in your cluster then executes against that command–it doesn’t facilitate you setting up the cluster–and this is a powerful distinction.

Ops innovation or new development model?

Mkinsey partner @ayewill’s popular study recomendations on the advantages of virtualization technologies vs. current cloud services was based on an ITops view of existing applications. He found most enterprises could internally provision raw iron at a similar cost to AWS.  However, when developers are able to write to a coherent web service with automatic server provisioning embedded in the API the game can change. The great divide in the cloud conversation is between existing application porting vs. new applications and features built from the ground up to take advantage of cloud APIs.  Developers are, as ever, the magic beans.

I’ll be listening tomorrow to find out if the ITops, management tools definition is the focus, or if the vendors and customers have staked out something much more ambitious and developer focused.