The hype machine is in full swing regarding cloud based computing, and I’m beginning to think that this juggernaut of marketing and confusion may be the biggest barrier of them all to wide-spread cloud adoption.

I said this a few posts ago, and I’ve had a lot of conversations about this with various people.  Cloud isn’t new.  It’s a repackaging of failed or quasi-failed ventures of the past.  Remember how SaaS was going to change the world and do away with the need for IT departments to manage all these complex applications and databases, and we were just going to be able to use a web browser to get at whatever application we needed to use?  I’m sure you’re all beacons of productivity and your IT departments have shrunk to one person because of your heavy SaaS adoption, right?

If you’ll recall, Web 2.0 (another of those meaningless marketing terms that never should have been printed) was going to change the world with its ability to ubiquitously provide seamless connectivity from any platform to any Web 2.0 ‘enabled’ application (whatever that meant).  I bet you’re all just connecting to all your apps from your cell phones and seamlessly using the same interface from desktop to laptop to phone to kiosk to <insert other technology I can’t think of right now> and are just so stinking productive, right?

Remember a few years further back how Managed Services were going to bring all of our data centers into these massively efficient multi-tenant datacenters with millions of machines and petabytes of data storage in them, effectively returning all that datacenter space back to the business to put revenue generating bodies in and eliminate IT?  Yeah, never really happened.

The major barrier here for cloud computing is that it isn’t new, and people are really starting to catch on to that fact.  Don’t get me wrong, the adoption of virtualization technology is a paradigm shifting event for most datacenters.  I’m very pro-virtualization, and think that complete adoption of VMware should be every CIOs goal.  But trying to put a buzz on virtualization of ‘private cloud’ has gotten old very quickly, almost to the point of being meaningless.  You’re not creating a cloud, you’re creating a highly dynamic foundation of infrastructure.  Try building a house on a cloud foundation and see how far you get.  

I personally refuse to talk about VMware in the context of a cloud, as I think most people are sick and tired of hearing about it that way. ‘Cloud’ has become such an over-used term that it has effectively lost any meaning it may have once had.  Of course, I argue it never had any meaning, since anyone and everyone decided to put the term on every piece of technology being sold, regardless of whether it honestly had anything to do with compute workloads that could be automatically moved between data centers based on business criteria or not.  Suddenly, every USB drive has something to do with the cloud.  Every software vendor on the planet has a cloud offering (which just has to be run on a large farm of servers in your datacenter), and before long your cereal box is going to have some magical connection to ‘the cloud’.  

At some point one of two things has to happen.  Either the phrase ‘cloud computing’ must take on meaning, and by meaning, I intend to say that everyone agrees to what it’s definition is, or two, if you open  your mouth to talk about it, you’re going to be told by your prospect or customer to shut it, because they’re sick of being talked to about things that have no real product/solution behind them.  Remember, IT solutions should do one or more of three things: 1) reduce costs, 2) avoid costs, and 3) increase revenues.  If you can’t start to show some real dollars and real components of the solution, why are people going to listen to the conversation.  Yes, the concept is cool, it is flashy, it plays well to analysts as ‘visionary’, but if it can’t really be executed on, what’s the point?

Video killed the radio star, and hype may kill cloud computing.  We’ll see.