Are Conference Calls the New Coffeehouses of Idea Enlightenment?

Edison is believed to have said “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”, and 9 out of 10 times “implementation trumps innovation” when it comes to achieving commercial success, but is it just me, or has the well of new ideas around cloud computing run a bit dry recently?

Big Data is rapid gaining ground on cloud computing when it comes to search popularity on gartner.com. And SDN (Software Defined Networking) may be flavor of the month in cloud blogs, but although there is a succinct impact on cloud computing, this is really more a networking idea. Now off course,  cloud computing is only one force – and mainly an enabling one - in the nexus of cloud, information, social and mobile, but when monitoring the various publicly available industry news feeds, I get a bit of a groundhog day (the movie) feeling. You might even say we have taken a step back in some cases, with enterprises implementing older concepts - such as managed hosting - under the moniker of cloud, as my colleague David Mitchel Smith described in a recent post on reverse cloudwashing.

Is it because everyone is so busy hammering out existing cloud ideas into products, that there seems to be less new ideas around? Back in 2009 I wrote about the 4P’s of Innovation  (Problem, Ponder, Publish, Pilot), and although there still are a lot of publications, many of them revisit ideas first seen in various cloud industry blogs. Now I understand that blogs are supposed to be about things that haven’t been built yet (otherwise we would call them brochures), and that today’s publication also cover implementations, references and even failures, but it did make me stop and think about the process of idea creation.

Nowadays any thinking starts with browsing, and that led me almost straight to a TED talk on “Where good ideas come from?” TED evolves around “ideas worth sharing” and possibly an even more effective way to share ideas is to animate them in the way the RSAnimate project of the Royal Society of Arts been doing.  What the video clip did to music, these short animations are doing to ideas, visionary speeches and pitches (=put them on YouTube). Here the 4 minute animation of “Where good ideas come from” (ending with a book plug).

In Gartner we have what I would call “institutionalized idea mechanisms”, that include the creation of regular publications such as hype cycle reports, predicts and - a bit down the implementation road - cool vendor reports. Over the past months I have had the pleasure of participating in some of these, and all serve towards rating, categorizing and vetting ideas and concepts. 

In addition we have our Research Communities (RCs). The form factor of most of these RCs are conference calls, and although these in general are more productive (although less funny) than the classic ”the Conference Call”  by David Grady, I am glad we complement “the days we work with Sparky” with in-person and off-site meetings.

As Steven Johnson discusses, most ground breaking ideas were not epiphanies or eureka moments and like good wine, ideas do get better when shared, regardless of whether they are shared in a meeting, a conference call or a nineteenth century coffeehouse. Look forward to sharing some of the ideas I’m currently socializing here, but meanwhile let me know if you think I missed some recent cool new cloud ideas.

Truth in (round) numbers?

Statistics matter, not only in business, but increasingly also in our social life – well, at least in our social media life. Some of the statistics I noticed this week were round numbers, like 1000. With 1000 representing both the number now showing under “followers” in Twitter and the revenue number for research (that’s excluding events, consulting and other items) we grew to in 2011.

And on my blog I saw – a bit to my surprise - it has been of full 10 weeks since my last post! That’s however more a case of bloggers block than writers block, as I did (co-)author the round number of 10 research notes since joining this summer. To catch up, I am including below a short overview of the topics these research notes covered (Gartner clients only) and that I likely will explore further in the future - both in research and using (social) media.

So what topics did these 10 research notes address? First to mention are the Predicts 2012. I participated in two this year, one called Predicts 2012: Cloud Computing Is Becoming a Reality in which we revisited an earlier prediction on cloud lock-in and explored the idea of a Maslov type hierarchy of needs for cloud computing customers. In this needs hierarchy fear of lock-in will be gaining ground as more basic needs like security are better understood.

In the second Predicts 2012: CSPs Need to Redefine Their Business Scope we focused on the expected penetration of Cloud Service Brokering among leading Communication (and increasingly Cloud) Service Providers or CSPs. Cloud Service Brokerage (CSB) was also the topic of an Emerging Services Analysis note. As discussed during the 2011 symposium keynotes brokerage of individual solutions into more whole, aggregated and integrated solutions is increasingly becoming a necessity in the world full of cloud specialists typically offering one thing at enormous scale and lowest possible price points.

But the emerging cloud computing discipline also has distinct touch points with IT markets and disciplines that have been around for many years, like outsourcing (particularly in Europe) and with the IT operations management (ITOM) discipline. With regard to the first I contributed to work from our colleagues in the outsourcing & IT services team on a Market Map and Compass, aiming to give some guidance on when to choose which approach. Meanwhile in the ITOM area a note was published called Cloud Management Platforms: A Step toward ‘ERP for IT’. I did not participate in this one personally, but given my earlier writings like "Lean, and the art of Cloud Computing Management”, you will understand I welcome this approach whole-heartedly.

A foundational element and quantitative bearing point for all these types of research notes are the industry Forecasts and Forecast Analysis notes, such as the one for Enterprise Network Services (which includes hosting, colocation and cloud IaaS services) that our team publishes in a quarterly cadence. In these we expanded the forecast horizon to 2016, which somehow feels a lot less round that the previous horizon of 2015.

A less broadly known but very interesting part of our research are the Marketing Essentials notes aimed at technology and service providers. I worked on ”Four Strategic Options for CSPs to Explore Cloud Computing Opportunities which came out shortly after this Competitive Landscape on the approaches of two European CSPs (Telecom Italia and Orange Business Services) and the earlier mentioned Emerging Technology Analysis regarding the use of self-service portals and APIs in cloud computing. APIs are becoming an increasingly important part of cloud computing and my latest research on Market Trends explores further how dynamic allocation of network capacity through use of an API (enabled by emerging software defined networking standards such as Openflow) could become the third foundational element of infrastructure as a service (next to compute and storage as a service). In this note we explore how enterprises may want to command a business class of networking services - similar to how enterprises (in the good old days) commanded a business class of airline services – but all using the same underlying infrastructure as consumer offerings.

So what’s next?
First of all lots of the day to day analyst activities I described in my (talking of round numbers) cloud in a hundred days post and more recently by my colleague Lydia Leong in a post called Five reasons you should work here. First upcoming item on the publication calendar in an overview of the research agenda our team will be writing against in 2012 and of course the annual 2012 cool vendor reports for which the nominations now are all in.

With regard to the momentum of cloud computing, I guess it is fair to say that even when one might believe we had seen the top of the hype(cycle), the amount of buzz and excitement around cloud computing continues to grow. In some cases resembling the mad rush of the days of Open Systems (where boards with no particular insight or interest in technology would a mandate a move to "open systems" (what ever that meant), sometimes even despite what business cases and common sense would suggest). And if we wanted, we could fill every week here by attending briefings from provider- and vendor-organizations on their new cloud computing plans and offerings.

But as with any new technology the proof of the pudding lies not in cooking it (or even in writing about it), it lies in eating it. And that is the next step. Moving from specific use cases (such as test-dev, customer facing web applications and high performance computing) to the generic - deploying, more and more parts of enterprise’s vast application portfolio’s using cloud based datacenter services. It’s this crossing of the chasm that has consistently proven to be the most difficult step for both vendors and technologies to take. It’s the numbers (round or not) that will eventually be the judge of how successful the transition will be.
PS. Almost all of the above notes were written in cooperation with other Gartner analysts, for a who's who see the detailed listing of lead- and co-authors by document here.

The rise of IT-industrialization

A few days ago I attended the analyst summit of one of Europe’s large service providers and the theme of industrialization rang through very clearly in many of the presentation and interview sessions. Those of you who followed my earlier writings know that applying the lessons of modern manufacturing to today’s IT, is a topic near to my heart.  Back in 2004, long before joining Gartner, I wrote an article on IT-dustrialization in CFO magazine , followed by many blogs, later bundled in “Lean and the art of cloud computing management”. At Gartner IT services industrialization is covered in my area under the topic of IUS (Infrastructure Utility Services) and I am currently working with two of my European colleagues - who have been covering IUS for several years - on a market map and compass for this IT industry area.

But, as mentioned earlier publishing in many cases precedes (best) practices, so it was refreshing to see how the ideas of industrialization were very much present during the mentioned analyst day. It would go too far (also given our blog policy) to list the whole story here, but let’s look at some of the more interesting bits and sound bites.

In a very open welcome talk, the CEO acknowledged that maintaining quality is one of the hardest things when moving to a more industrialized production method. To me this sounded a lot like the problems that the Japanese car industry faced when first importing into Europe. The cost of their cars was significantly lower, but they came with a quality level to match. Now we all know that in those years Dr. W. Edwards Deming made his first visits to Japan, introducing statistical analysis and simple tools to apply quality control at all stages, and the rest is history, with Japanese quality for many years matching or even exceeding global quality (Later the Deming circle formed an important foundation of other best practice movements in both manufacturing and IT).

The several ten thousand strong production department of this provider went through a similar transition. All staff was immersed in (on-line, multi-media and in person) training programs and  processes were defined and orchestrated to an extent comparable with the ballet-like orchestration you see in modern factories. Comparing itself with internal and external benchmarks was made a way of life and statistical measurement tools were applied widely. Inspiration for much of this came from conversations the head of production of this provider had with his customers: large manufacturing organizations employing several hundred thousands of factory workers with a high focus on product and process quality. (Note: Don’t mistake the term factory worker we use here for the traditional blue collar versus white collar division of labor. Today’s factory workers are often higher educated, better trained and in many cases even better paid than most clerical white collar jobs, while the production activities they are responsible for are more automated and supported by more robot technology than most regular office - or IT - work).

But in IT, even more than in manufacturing, changes are a major enemy of quality. And with the type industrialized scale we are talking about here that means that thousands or even tens of  thousands of change requests are to be applied each night or weekend. In manufacturing it is nowadays best practice that any factory worker can stop the production line when he/she feels quality is somehow at risk. But - as availability is one of our primary definitions of quality - stopping the line, a.k.a an outage,  is exactly what we don’t want to do in IT . So in this case a best practice from the airline industry was applied. Any change has to be checked by 4 eyes before being implemented into production. In other words, it has to be reviewed by at least two people, call it the pilot and the co-pilot. An intermediate step that at first may seem expensive - just like most people in the eighties felt it was crazy to have any worker be able to stop a multi-million dollar assembly line - but that in the end reduces overall cost. Also because doing things right the first time is - over time - always cheaper than incurring rework, penalties and other cost of non-quality.

But industrialization goes further, also for the customer who is at the receiving end of these industrialized services.  In this case the CIO of one of the global customers of this provider gave his insigtfull perspectives on the changes the industry is going through. Again a couple of soundbites.

This CIO is driving his organization toward obtaining “anything as a service”, which eventually – as he put it - enables CIO’s to separate the I from the T (allows focus on the Information, not the Technology). For providers this means moving from delivering traditional system integration projects, to standardized products that are delivered as a service. This change does not only impact how it is delivered, but also how it is procured. Again a car analogy. When this CIO was to order a new car, he did not go shopping around; he did not even test drive his final choice. As he had a history of good experiences with this manufacturer, a rough idea of the type of model he wanted (eg. 4 door sedan, no MPV, no SUV), and a number of minimum requirements (think of automatic, diesel, navigation), he basically picked the car unseen, as he knew it would be “good enough” for his requirements. I would classify this as a mature buyer in a mature market. Where the immature buyer will shop around, go on test drives in many makes and models (including in two door models he is not even allowed to order as a company car) and from manufacturers he may have never heard of, the mature buyer knows what he wants and rather spends his valuable time on stuff that really matters (in business terms: on activities that differentiate the company).

At this stage the market has not many mature buyers yet (even for cars, I know because I just selected mine and that took me more than a couple of calls). But mature buying also requires a mature market. In the car industry, buyers know that most of the major brands now deliver high quality and reliability. While the brands that did not reach that trusted status yet, offer warranty periods that even Charles Deming could only have dreamed off. It is this kind of trusted quality level the industry will need to reach.
As for cost, also there the ambitions and expectations are high. As Adam Smith showed in his wealth of nations, a traditional craftsman might manufacture one pin a day. A pin factory, however, created 48,000 pins a day using ten men. In the light of what Taylorism and scientific management did in manufacturing, the voiced ambition of reducing IT cost by 90% seems a lot more feasible. Especially when realizing that in some of today’s on-line "factories" (i.e. consumer web shops) the cost of an IT item already might be 1/10 of the TCO based cost that IT departments charge in their internal catalogs of IT services (and when procuring things as a service there is no "ownership", so also no Total Cost of "Ownership", although there may be other governance related cost).

I’ll finish off with a last (car) anecdote from this CIO: When Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler originally estimated the size of the overall addressable car market, they came to about 1 million cars (which is about as accurate as the max of 5 computers that Thomas Watson once arrived at). But more interesting than the overall number is the way they arrived at it. As there were no available statistics on cars, they estimated the number of households that would be wealthy enough to afford a chauffeur.  We now know that overwhelming majority of cars are bought by users who drive these cars themselves. When extending this to IT, the idea would be that future CIO’s would be like today’s chauffeurs, the people that drive IT in a very small set of special cases, while most of IT would be “bought and driven“ by users.  An interesting idea, let’s hope IT-industrialization can drive the required maturing of the supply side fast enough to be ready for this scenario.

Any comments/questions send me a mail at gregor.petri at gartner.com.

The art of listening

One of the first tips I got when entering the workforce was "You have two ears and only one mouth for a reason!", meaning that in conversations with customers you should spend twice as much time listening as you do talking. Point was to avoid becoming like a radio with only one button: "Send".

Over the years I learned that above also applies to "new media" such as email, blogging, tweeting and podcasting. You need to use the receive button at least twice as much as the send button. Although less obvious, I am trying to maintain this ratio also as an analyst. Maybe not in every single conversation - our type of analyst inquiries are not like psycho-analysts calls where the analyst just keeps asking the patient repeatedly "and how do you feel about this?" - but overall it still makes sense to allocate substantially more time to input (also from colleagues, peers and even competitors) than to output.

With modern management techniques increasingly focused on managing a workforce that is increasingly spread out and that maintains work hours outside the traditional nine to five, it may – across many industries - feel increasingly difficult for individuals to maintain this balance of input versus output (as only the latter seems to gets measured and formally acknowledged nowadays).

Luckily there is modern technology - like podcasts and RSS feed readers - to help streamline at least parts of the input process. Funny thing is that some of this technology is not that new at all. My first encounter with Gartner's "podcast avant la lettre" was with the "Talking Technology" series that back then came on “compact cassettes”  (for young readers that may never have seen a cassette - not even in your "my first Sony" -  there is now an iPhone app that emulates the experience). This "Talking Technologies" series still exists (feed here, subscription required), in fact our High Tech and Technology Providers team just participated in the November edition with a segment on  the "4G, the Next frontier for Cellular Networks" special report that describes why 4G matters and what impact it will have on both providers and consumer (Personally I just hope we will use 4G at least as much to receive as to broadcast).

Just like the classic "Talking Technologies" cassette tapes and the subsequent CDs, these podcasts require a subscription. Fairly recently we added to this a series of almost daily Gartner webinars, which are open to all interested parties after a short registration process. You can register for these webinars  here, but to make it even more convenient you can also subscribe to a feed with the upcoming webinars or to a feed with all replays. This Tuesday (November 15th) I will be doing my first contribution to this series. In this webinar, called "The Crowded Cloud", I will talk about  how many different industry players, including Communication Service Providers, are trying to become the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) of choice for their enterprise customers. Would love to welcome you there.

As you gathered by now the above is part of the 1/3th of  my activities focused on output/sending, but I look forward to balancing that out soon with more personal and more two way communications. Meanwhile please feel free to comment below.

Cloud in one hundred days (and nights)

This week the Gartner Symposium visited an unexpectedly sunny Barcelona. This year’s theme for the Gartner Symposium is  "Re-imagine IT" and how the forces of Cloud, Social, Information (incl. big data) and Mobile are forming a nexus (Websters: a connected group or series) of change, see the bottom of this post for a link to the on-line replays. While here I ran into a former colleague who reminded me that this is also around day 100 in my new role as analyst. And although I am all too aware that being an analysts is not even remotely like running a country, this seems as good a point in time as any to have short look back and forward.
Apart from the usual getting acquainted with some new and some familiar (not to say classic) systems, here are some of the things that kept me busy:

• A core activity is off course writing research, in October an Emerging Technology Analysis on  How Self-Service Portals for Cloud Infrastructure Services Impact the Customer Experience published, followed by a European focused Competitive Landscape on  Two CSP Approaches to Cloud Computing  in November.
  Still in the process of peer reviews, fact reviews, editing etc. are a co-authored piece on Cloud Service Brokerage and a Marketing Essentials document describing four strategic options for Cloud Service Providers. Upcoming are also the annual Gartner Predicts for 2012, for which I got to submit a new SPA (Strategic Planning Assumption) and had a look back at an earlier one.
• But analysts also get out on occasion, for example to host a forum during the press day of a cloud datacenter opening at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport (some coverage here). Or to participate in a cloud brainstorm with the lead architects and national CTO’s of a large European communication services provider. And on the end user side: to facilitate  a global cloud strategy workshop for a leading European life sciences organization and to moderate a European vendor day for an international freedom and security alliance.
• In addition there are the inquiries.  I stopped counting at some point, but spoke with numerous banks, governments, manufacturers and many service providers in all shapes and forms (from gaming agencies to health care providers) and from all parts of the world, including Africa, Asia, Europe and the America’s about their cloud computing strategies. Also met in person with several members of our EXP program and had briefings with and/or visited several cloud and communication service providers (CSPs).
• These cloud service providers included traditional (and not so traditional) hardware providers, software companies, hosters, co-locators and a surprisingly large number of cloud providers form other continents that are in the process of setting up European facilities in Amsterdam. Also managed to squeeze in a visit to the European edition of VMworld and spoke with their executives about the (European) market.
• Given the fast growing number of cloud providers in Europe we also set up a continuous survey (see last month’s blog), so if you are providing (or planning to provide) cloud services in Europe it makes sense to have a look, also if you’re interested in the process of setting up a vendor briefing around your offering.
• On the internal research front started to participate in the communities covering IaaS, PaaS, IUS (Infrastructure Utility Service) and ITOM (IT Operations Management incl. private cloud).  Other internal activities included onboarding training, getting a phone, ordering a car and last week I was asked to become the second or backup agenda manager in our team (Our agenda management is not about scheduling or calendars, but about setting and managing the agenda storyline of key trends and key issues that we write to).
• Looking forward: I am hosting a customer roundtable at symposium about  “How private or public should your ideal infrastructure cloud be?” and next Tuesday (15 Nov) I am presenting a Gartner Tech Tuesday webinar called “The Crowded Cloud – Opportunities for CSPs”  (open for viewing after registering here). Going forward I plan to find more time for blogging again and for writing more in depth research on the topics covered in this blog.

Meanwhile you may want watch highlights from this year’s Symposium, like in other years these are open for general viewing (after a short free registration process) at www.gartnereventsondemand.com. In addition to the Gartner keynotes, the special guest keynote interviews and other highlights, you can also watch sessions from the symposium sponsors there, some even adapted their session –like Google – to the keynote from earlier on the day.
Apart from the earlier mentioned nexus, my personal favorite sound bites from the opening keynote were: Spending on cloud currently is already far in the tens of Billions but still only a small percentage (around 3%) of total enterprise IT spend and growing much more rapidly than traditional spend. And: Cloud will do for IT what supply chain models did for manufacturing. Both topics I hope to touch upon further in upcoming research, talks, presentations and blogs.

Using a cloud service to … collect information on European cloud infrastructure services

The public cloud infrastructure as a service market is developing quickly, also in Europe. Over the past months we saw the number of international IaaS providers setting up shop in Europe increase, while also several European based providers launched new or upgraded offerings.

To keep a finger on the pulse of developments we started, as part of the European Cloud IaaS coverage at Gartner, surveying pan-European providers of Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service . We are now extending the invite to participate in that survey more widely (like we recently did for the CIO survey).

Especially in Europe we see cloud IaaS services being offered as an extension to existing services, this survey focuses therefore on how IaaS services fit with the overall service portfolios of providers, so it also includes short questions on adjacent offerings in areas such as PaaS, SaaS, Managed Desktops & VDI, DC Outsourcing, Infrastructure Utility Services, Managed Hosting, Co-location and  IT Professional & Brokerage Services.

If you are providing IaaS services in at least two European regions, then please take some time to fill out this survey. The data received will be used to gauge the overall state of the pan-European Public Cloud IaaS landscape, not to describe individual providers (for these we use other information such as the regular vendor briefing process, see here how to apply for such briefings).

You can take the survey from the Gartner Blog Network (GBN) page here

If you have any questions please send a short email to gregor.petri at gartner.com

Of these 10 most hated jobs, how many did you have?

Earlier this week Yahoo Finance ran an article on the 10 most hated jobs (based on a survey asking hundreds of thousands of employees at a major career site).

What amazed me most - apart from the large number of IT jobs, including the top one,  making the list – was that I personally was employed in no less than five of these . Now you may think: “What a miserable career that must have been!”, but to be honest, it never felt like that.  Sure I can relate to some of dissatisfiers that people listed, such as a lack of direction from upper management (actually described for one of these jobs - guess which one - as “employers are unable to communicate coherently, and lack an understanding of the technology”). But overall I had good fun doing most of my five.

In fact, some of my other jobs – although fun at the time - would have been more logical to make the list. As a student I was a part-time restaurant worker (even though my parents insisted the only job I was doing part-time was studying) and when that restaurant burned down I spend 3 months rebuilding it as a construction worker (hard hat and all).  Both of which did not make the list.

Now this survey is not about IT and does not even mention cloud computing, so why discuss it here?
The reason is that with cloud computing lots of job roles will be changing and there is an opportunity for all of us to think about which aspects of our current roles we like best (and which we hate most). So we have these clear in our mind while venturing into this new world.

On changes at the macro and organizational level –beyond cloud -  Mark McDonald  just published a series around  "Thinking Small" (It is time for IT to ‘THINK small’,  Thinking Small — Creating value rather than controlling costs , Thinking Small — Thinking value) and a piece called Re-Imagine IT, Lead from the Front  (a preview on the CIO experience at Orlando Symposium).

But also at the micro level we can do our share in re-imagining our job roles. Cloud computing - with its “as a service” delivery mechanism – may add some degrees of freedom to what can be imagined. Not that it will eliminate some of the less loved aspects of our jobs by having for example: EaaS for doing our Expenses as a Service, RaaS for doing our weekly Reporting as a Service and MaaS  for attending mandatory Meetings as a Service (although the idea sounds pretty cool). But cloud may enable us - also as individuals -to focus on what we are best at and on where we add the most value (which often seems to equate to having the most fun – or at least to getting the most recognition).

Scale (and particularly large scale) is certainly an important aspect of cloud computing, but let’s hope for (and work hard on) keeping our jobs at a human scale. Just like the way we apply our laptops and tablets is not impacted by having  1 million or 1 trillion transistors inside, the scale of the cloud should not impact how closely we work with people. In fact, the efficiencies of scale that cloud computing brings, may allow us to be even more granular and differentiated (a.k.a.  customer focused) at the local level.

Personally I recently did my evaluation and took the opportunity to make a switch (and yes, am having fun!). Meanwhile I am observing my kids’ early (part-time) exploits into working live. First conclusion they reached is that restaurant work definitely beats a paper route (better hours) and restocking super-market shelves (more degrees of freedom). I am still working on getting them enthusiastic for any jobs involving IT (or clouds, for that matter). Not sure this top 10 will help.

Travelling at the speed of cloud in Europe

First post from my new base blogs.gartner.com. When looking at public cloud infrastructure as a service it is fair to say that, with some notable exceptions, most off the larger scale activities, initiatives and even the majority of excitement and buzz around this phenomena so far originated outside of Europe. Understandable, as both the largest and most visible users of public IaaS – think of organizations such as Facebook, Twitter and Netflix – and the most well known providers of Iaas started their cloud activities on the other site of the Atlantic. Even when looking at government activities it is the US government that seems to be most enthusiastic, both in intend and action, about cloud computing.

Over the last year there are however some encouraging signs that public cloud IaaS is also gaining interest in Europe, both among users, providers, government and the press. Users are asking more questions and starting pilots and projects; Local providers are bringing their first or even second generation offerings to market; Governments are investigating opportunities and the EU even stated it wants Europe to be not only “Cloud-Friendly” but “Cloud-Active”. And in typical European tradition we see market players joining forces in new European associations or adding new chapters to their (many) existing vehicles of national and international collaboration.

A telling sign of cloud IaaS becoming more mainstream in Europe was the press picking up on the recent power outage in Dublin, headlining with how it impacted the European services of cloud IaaS providers. Now this power outage – for which the jury is still out on whether it was caused by lightning or something else – did off course not only impact cloud providers. Also several more traditional datacenters and datacenters services struggled, but the fact the press picked the cloud angle as headlining topic was telling.

So it’s clear there is a lot going on around public cloud IaaS in Europe: places to see, things to do and stuff to write about. And that is exactly what I plan to do from here. After the summer vacation I have started as a Research Director at Gartner covering this area. My colleague Lydia Leong just published a short piece detailing the Gartner teams, people and roles covering public cloud IaaS on her blog. At Gartner all IT-related analysts’ blog posts are first published on the Gartner Blog Network (GBN) at blogs.gartner.com before posting to existing or personal blog pages. If you’re interested in what we write and not write about on these blogs have a look at the Gartner Blog Network Q&A. Although tempted I will not use this post to do a further introduction of myself – with all of today’s social media my history should be an open book anyhow – plus I now have a new profile page here on gartner.com. In a next post I will cover some of the topics we are currently looking at in Europe and ways to brief us on your activities in those areas if you are a provider.

I do want to end with a disclaimer. Although “European cloud” has a nice ring to it, reality is that the idea of a European Cloud is just as “virtual” a concept as European citizen, European market and European tax. If you speak to someone from Europe and you ask where they are from, they will say Germany or Italy or France or the UK. Very few will say “I am from Europe” (unless they expect you to have absolutely no idea where their home country is located). Same for the European market. Although we have free traffic of (most) goods and services, companies have to fight for each individual market and European market share is a construct of adding up shares in individual country markets. Even a European Tax we have (so far) managed to avoid. And despite many consumers using global solutions like Twitter and Facebook all the time, I don’t expect the European cloud IaaS market to be extremely uniform for the foreseeable future. Not just because some regulations still prevent this, but also because local cultures, habits and even things like labor relations, are vastly different across different parts of Europe. This makes Europe such an interesting place to be, also when looking at this area of cloud computing.

Did the global summer of cloud start in NYC?

Having just returned a scorching hot New York (host of CloudExpo East 2011) to a definitely cooler Europe, it makes sense to see whether these differences in temperature also apply to the cloud market.

This 8^th Expo was the third cloud expo I was invited to speak at and it definitely was the biggest so far. If CloudExpo West in November signaled the entry of the large mainstream vendors like Oracle, Dell and Microsoft - not to mention several CA divisions - as major sponsors, then this edition was signified by the larger turn out of end user organizations and even some coverage on mainstream news channel such as CNN. A quick audience poll on the first day revealed that about 90% of the audience is in the orientation phase, getting ready to do some serious spending (you could almost hear the vendors sigh of relieve as it is starting to look their investments will indeed pay off).

Although many of the sessions were vendors explaining their approaches and offerings, there were some notable exceptions featuring real implementations, like the case study session where hamburgers (in fact plastic burger replica’s holding gift certificates) were passed out to the audience.  The “how to get from here to there session by Andi Mann, where he showed two alternative paths to the cloud (an evolutionary and a revolutionary one) was also well received. In fact his subsequent book signing session generated a queue even longer than the one at the lunch buffet.

Looking at the event from a European angle it was refreshing to see several European solutions featured in the expo. I saw a next generation NAS solution from Belgium – addressing MSP’s interested in offering an S3 equivalent without requiring the traditional high NAS upfront investments; a solution from France to automatically build the innard’s  of VM’s based on specific OS and middleware requirements.  And a PaaS solution - originally from Holland - built in the KISS (Keep it Stupidly Simple) tradition of the great 4GLs, but with the scalability and usability that the cloud can bring to application development.

A special mention goes to the Holland Pavilion–located directly opposite the CA stand -  featuring no less than 8 additional Dutch companies and start-up’s on their way to make it big. Now this is not the first time the Dutch picked New York as a good spot to start the move into America (remember New Amsterdam?), but it is refreshing to see a government investing to stimulate economic activities around cloud computing (They did not yet spend the US$ 20B the U.S. government is vowing to put into cloud computing this year, but it’s a start).  The other interesting angle of the mission was to position Amsterdam (in this case old Amsterdam) as digital gateway to Europe. With broadband in almost every home and international bandwidth that matches the proverbial throughput and transit capacity of the Rotterdam harbor this seems a logical proposition.

In my session on Day two I covered several aspects of vendor Lock-In and more importantly, possible approaches to prevent it. We discussed standards, of which most are still too early to tell or too close to call, although the open datacenter alliance - as if on cue - published their first use case proposals on the same day. I also explored the benefits of a software based fabric approach for portability across (hybrid) clouds and revisited the earlier discussed 3D cloud strategy model.

Overall the event showed that cloud is becoming red hot, almost as hot as the pavement outside the Javits convention center (a condition many an attendee sought refuge from at one of the rooftop reception's thrown by the various sponsors). With all this momentum we are likely to see a next edition with even more cloud use cases and success stories, also from Europe. This could be done by every provider session including a real-live implementation story or a separate track dedicated to sharing the experiences of cloud (end-) users. Maybe a bit like our recent cloud leaders initiative, which features online stories from cloud luminaries such as PGI and  DonorsChoose  and cloud accelerators like LayeredTech, ScaleMatrix and DNS Europe (now also available as free Cloud Leaders iPad app). 

Don’t let the cloud creep up on you! (also not at Cloud Expo NYC next week)

In IT we like to use fancy words like architecture, governance and strategy, but is our approach to IT innovations indeed as structured and planned as these terms imply or is IT in many cases just like real life: IT is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans? And if yes, does that also apply to cloud computing?

When I recently published my “to cloud or to compute” column, fellow columnist and IT service management expert Alee Roos submitted the following “confession”(at ITSM portal):

• “… I'll make an embarrassing confession. I had not been much interested in the cloud-thing but finally went to listen to a presentation on cloud and cloud security. It was only then I realized that I had already put most of my business in the cloud without thinking much about it. The point was that I had bought services like web-site, Outlook Exchange, remote backups and a eSurveys, not cloud. I bought them because they solved some immediate business need at a very reasonable price.”

But Alee is not alone; I believe many organizations are in the same predicament and not only for SaaS solutions. When speaking to the European CTO of one of the largest IaaS providers (now part of a large Telco) he explained how many of their customers tend to move to the cloud. At some point a customer may have a need for temporary test or development capacity. Because it is a one-off need and not as strategic as production workloads, they “give it a try”. Often that first try is successful and they are surprised it was that easy. So a few weeks later – when a new need arises - they take the same route again. Often without a lot of due diligence, because by now this is an already used solution from an already accepted vendor. And before they know it they have several critical and/or production systems running in a cloud.

Now this is not the first time this is happening in IT. Many of us were taken by surprise by departmental servers (mini's), then we didn't notice PCs become important and costly (remember one of the first TCO surveys, the one that rocked our world and the one that caused us to run around trying to “implement” ITIL so we could make them as reliable, controlled and efficient as our mainframes had always been?). Next we managed to underestimate that at some point everyone - not just a few exceptions in higher management - needed mobile phones. And just recently some companies discovered that they had spreadsheets running core business logic that had become so large and so complex that to continue running them, they had to buy dedicated servers (yes these Excel-only servers now exist). I can’t imagine that any IT professional would plan for these things to work out like this. And finally how about the “structured and strategic way” we are introducing tablets into the organization? Yes, as mentioned, IT is what happens while you're busy making other plans. And now we risk letting the cloud creep up on us.

With SaaS most people have started to realize this, in fact our former CIO, David Hansen , now general manager of CA Technologies Enterprise Solutions and Cloud Management Business, explained to fellow CIOs at Evanta’s annual CIO Executive Summit how he – to get a feeling for what was being used sorted through the many authentication requests from inside the company to outside services. It was amazing to hear what employees were using, even back then, when cloud was not yet a household name and in a time when everything that was not approved by default was verboten (remember the days you had to leave the office to access Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc.?).

And now as an industry, are we at risk for similar experiences with IaaS, too? Guess it's a case of l’histoire se répète (but a Dutch proverb involving a Donkey also comes to mind).

Of course you could ask: how bad is it if this happens? If users are happy, prices are reasonable and service is good. Why should we care? Well –beside the obvious one: risk management – avoiding vendor lock-in seems to be a pretty good reason. Just be sure it doesn’t creep up on you while you’re busy making other big plans.

By the way, I will be speaking more about this topic in my session at Cloud Expo on Tuesday afternoon at the Javits Center in New York: "Cloud Users of the World, Unite!, How to Remedy Cloud Lock-in.”