Dan Blum

We used to always talk about “Internet years.” Now, to coin a phrase, we may talk about “cloud years.”

The notion of compressed time frames particularly struck me on a briefing today with Eric Olden from Symplified; I told him I’d just gone over my notes from our previous briefing in May and that seemed like a long time ago to both of us. Indeed every day, we hear of new public cloud, private cloud, or cloud-related capabilities and issues arriving.

One thing hasn’t changed: people are still confused. Two years into our coverage of cloud computing, I thought we’d be through the definitional stage. But at the Gartner Symposium this week, at least half the clients I talked with were still struggling with what is cloud and what does it mean to them.

Of course, it’s fair to say that there’s much more to be confused about now than there was a year or two ago. The sweep of changes wrought on IT at cloud’s hands is staggering. I’m halfway through reading Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2010. Fair warning – this vast, wild, wonderful, 78-page gem of a multi-authored document has 38 different points on the curve to represent all the facets of cloud our analysts have found so far.

It’s required reading for those who wish to become confused enough to perhaps (dimly) understand the scope of IT’s transformation. Perhaps by the time I finish it, another cloud year will have already passed.

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Category: Uncategorized     Tags: cloud computing

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