Q&A with Steve Crawford of Jamcracker
VSM: How do you see the cloud changing the software ecosystem?
SC: On the supply-side, the biggest change will be that instead of selling licenses, software providers and resellers will need to adapt their sales models and begin selling subscription services. This will be easier-said-than-done for many – transforming an existing organization from a license sales model to selling service subscriptions can be as challenging as rehabilitating a crack addict... It can be a significant compensation issue for license software and distribution companies to deal with. A few companies, such as Microsoft, appear to be taking this on successfully, but many are not. This is a big reason why much of the innovation in cloud services is coming from new companies as opposed to established players.
On the consumption side, many businesses are already using cloud services today for email, conferencing and other applications. But the challenge for their IT departments, as they start using dozens of cloud services or more, will be to consolidate the cloud consumption model into the very fabric of how they do user management, security, policy enforcement, usage accounting and departmental charge-backs, as well as user support for their current on-premise software and infrastructure.
VSM: How is the role of internal IT changing?
SC: IT has traditionally managed on-premise resources for the enterprise. They have been the ones to mete out hardware and software to users as needed. With private cloud computing, internal resources are set up so that users can access them on-demand, using only what is needed and eliminating the need for IT to manually give a specific user access to resources. With public cloud services, enterprise departments can and often bypass IT entirely by going out and independently purchasing the resources they need. Ultimately, because of these changes IT will evolve to an IT-as-a-service model to source, aggregate and manage different public clouds and internal virtualized services throughout the enterprise.
VSM: What new responsibilities and concerns does IT have with cloud computing?
SC: Many large IT organizations are inordinately focusing their cloud strategy on private clouds; and therefore, view this as a matter of ‘bolting on’ a cloud delivery layer on top of their virtualized data center assets. They’re not thinking as much about how they can or should transform themselves towards becoming an internal service provider who sources, aggregates and delivers best-of-breed solutions, regardless of whether they are hosted internally or externally. But with many different clouds serving many different needs, building a cloud deployment strategy around a few offerings today raises the risk of managing services stovepipes tomorrow. For IT, this raises significant concerns around security and enforcing corporate password policy; compliance and audit reporting; implementing enterprise-wide licensing and departmental chargeback capabilities across all external and internal services being consumed within the organization; and the ability to offer provisioning, administration and support for external services that are procured directly by their employees from external providers without IT involvement.
