Cloud has Stolen the Thunder finally - Has it?

CLOUD has Stolen the Thunder finally -  Has it?

Part-1                                                                                                          www.SanjeetKumar.com 

          Over the last 20-30 years, enterprises have spent vast sums of capital to setup IT empires.  Inside story of these IT domain is always the same. 

You will find bright meeting rooms and fancy cubicles swamped with worthy geeks, analysts and project managers. Then there are Data centers and Storage rooms where invariably one can find sophisticated machines which you are forced to change every 3 to 5 years; rarely any equipment ages beyond 7 years… thanks to the combined efforts of vendors, sales personnel and hardware syndicates. Blame it to constant innovations and incompatibilities. 

21st century saw waves of convergence, distributed computing, SOA, open source, mobile applications etc. Technology ecosystem of IT shops were indeed impacted. Still, they didn't have all the punch, that is necessary to change the Business landscape. It certainly missed mentions in any CxO briefings and places where real decisions are made.

Now, the new thunder – CLOUD. Some call it Cloud computing; others differentiate in terms of private, public and hybrid cloud. More mature and respected ones have explained it using meaningful acronyms SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.

Unlike previous waves, this time however, surprisingly the word “IT Cloud” has finally stolen the thunder. It is being touched-on in Executive briefings and in some cases even in Board meetings! If nothing else, year 2012 should be remembered simply for this reason. IT has breached a barrier quietly… no one took notice of it! Never ever any IT paradigm could make way to Board rooms before.

Is it because?

1. Business executives have become tech savvy? Have they finally reached a level where they could understand technicalities and resulting value behind it?  or, 
2. Is it that this time marketing crescendo is unprecedented, after all this word ‘cloud’ is  more pleasing in lexicon per se. or, 
3. Is it because battered world economy has forced Executives to think beyond conventional areas? Or, 
4. Is it simply because this time, ICT sector has fashioned something to roar about. 

Which one is the right answer? Let us Analyze....... to be continued in Part-2

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