2012 Prediction: ScaleXtreme

What’s Your Cloud Personality in 2012?

Lots of folks have put out predictions, predicated on a one-size-fits all future of cloud computing. Yet cloud computing will be a subject of continued debate, fanaticism, polarization, confusion, gradation, fragmentation and exploration—as divisive as the presidential elections and as important to the future of technology and business as you want to make it. The most important thing IT professionals will have to do in 2012 is quickly understand where someone stands with respect to the cloud.

The cloud is either going to change everything or change nothing, be the ultimate transformer, or the ultimate disappointment. It’s either tech salvation or the harbinger of untold problems—it all depends on with whom you speak with. Which makes assessing a person’s point of view all the more critical. Whether you’re connecting with customers, interacting with vendors, hiring employees, talking with investors or dealing with the press, you’ll need to know where they stand on the cloud before you can have a useful dialog.

We offer a simple analysis of the five major cloud personalities and some suggestions on where the biggest audience will be in 2012:

Fanatical Futurists

These folks believe in the unlimited potential of any new technology. For them, cloud computing changes everything. They may start with its benefits to e-commerce and social gaming, but soon ascribe wildly optimistic powers to the new technology, claiming it will stop global warming or cure cancer. Everything before cloud computing no longer matters. This is the new economy, the new rules of IT, the new thing. You either “get it” or you don’t.

Informed Luddites

They read the news, follow the blogs, but treat new technologies with profound suspicion and distrust. Informed luddites take great pleasure in raining on the parade of the Fanatical Futurists. If you get an iPhone 4S, they’ll ask you if you’re having the same battery problems other users are complaining about.

When it comes to the cloud, informed luddites will detail their regulatory compliance concerns, outline the damage a cloud outage can do to their business or tell you about how insecure their data is. Some informed luddites are server huggers, but others are constricted by the morays of their employers, such as the IT admins at big financial houses. They allow inertia to carry them forward.

Point of Polarization

This is where the majority of cloud customers, vendors and pundits will be in 2012. People in this stage debate the merits of the new technology, fragment it into narrowly defined verticals and analyze the limits of its efficacy.

Technology becomes hard to talk about for people who are at the point of polarization. You say one thing about the cloud and someone else disagrees completely because you’re each using different definitions of what “cloud” means. Expect discussion on the pros and cons of public vs. private clouds, hybrid clouds, PaaS, IaaS, SaaS and several other flavors of cloud computing that have yet to be defined.