Andrea Di MaioToday I had an interesting conversation with a government client who – over ten years ago – architected a domain-specific integration broker supporting mission-critical applications running across jurisdictional boundaries. After having been detached to another agency for several years, he came back to his old agency at the beginning of this year, and discovered that – besides minor updates – the system had not evolved significantly and he could still recognize most of the architecture and building blocks he helped put together at the time.
The “problem” (if that’s a problem) is that the broker has been running almost without a glitch for a long time, and became almost invisible to those who use it. This is clearly a system component that – from the user perspective – has become a commodity, although it was a custom development and is still maintained by the agency.
As part of their increasing interest for cloud computing, the client said he would consider this as a good example of something that could be used as a service in the cloud. However, isn’t that what happened already? The broker became a commodity and – as a result – it did not evolve and now there are doubts about its ability to evolve to meet new requirements and to take advantage of new technologies.
While services available through a public cloud provided by a vendor are likely to be constantly innovated as a consequence of competitive pressures, those that governments embed in their own private clouds may not have enough incentives to be innovated over time. This argument has been used already in the past for government shared services, but becomes even more pertinent for cloud services.
But, after all, is that a bad thing? In the path to increasing commoditization the best future of a private government cloud may not be a better private government cloud.: It may actually be a public cloud.
Category: cloud Tags: cloud computing, innovation, integration
1 response so far ↓
1 Bruce Robertson May 25, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Could be, but it depends. Certainly someone else is in charge of innovation in the service provider. Some will be leading/bleeding edge, others just do enough to keep customers from leaving. The difference is that the customer can’t force it. This has been true of more traditional outsourcing service providers / hosters in the past, so of course it applies here. But, perhaps, since the services are more generalized, there can be more competition directly, and thus more emphasis on innovation on the part of the provider. This may come in the form of different services, not only better ones.
However, another aspect of innovation is demand. If the demand to change is not there, why bother? If in this client case, they didn’t need more and the existing system was working fine, then WHY NOT? If the situation changes, then sure, innovate. If there’s demand. If no demand, why bother with supply? Another aspect is wider sharing — with more customers, the set that DO need more innovation will push the provider, even if others do not. So, some customers who don’t need it yet, will get it anyway.
IMHO, the cloud services will innovate more quickly than traditional models — they’re more comparable and thus more beholden to competition. But, that’s just an opinion — let’s see what happens. To keep your own providers on their toes, don’t forget to use the basic principle of not getting locked into any single provider (product or service). This applies to cloud services too. In fact, it applies to pretty much everything.
Yes, everything.