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68% of the Fortune 100 are Clueless

cloudability.com

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Re: 68% of the Fortune 100 are Clueless

#11

Post by wccrawford »

JonLim wrote: post #7
wccrawford wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a company that had invested big $$$ into an agile tool without consulting the teams if it was adequate for their needs. For a month or 2, the teams used the tool as required. Eventually, when the boss turned his back, each team quietly found a tool. Because they were being quiet, each team found a different tool from every other team. They were actually tracking their progress in both systems, but the exp…

Curious: after the year of service was up, did the company decide to go with one of the other tools you guys found, or did they keep dropping stupid money?

After about 5 or 6 months of that nonsense, they discovered the deception (because we let them in on it... that was a nervous moment, and I got to break the news. lucky me!) and they finally relented and stopped pestering us about the tool they paid too much for. All the teams agreed fairly quickly that 1 particular tool was better, and we all standardized on it.

Re: 68% of the Fortune 100 are Clueless

#12

Post by jfrisby »

kevinpet wrote: post #9

My first thought was "is there any actual content in among the buzzwords". My second thought was "what's he trying to sell". Apparently, cloudability is a service that allows you to track your "cloud" spending, which seems totally useless to me. I mean, why should I track SaaS and Amazon S3 backups in the same category, but leave off $1000 Yourkit license in some other category?

One Tool to Rule them All would be nice, but at the moment we're focusing on a fairly specific niche to address real problems we've personally encountered at companies. We're not the only ones who've had these sorts of problems either:

http://gigaom.com/cloud/cloud-computing-fiascos-lessons-from...

The key thing here is really to address two things that seem to come up a lot:

1) Cost items that can vary considerably and where a mistake -- code bug, forgetfulness, sloppiness, whatever -- can leave you with serious sticker shock. (At one company we were at, an engineer spun up a couple hundred EC2 instances for a map/reduce job and forgot about them, racking up an extra $100,000 that month.)

2) Cost items that don't vary much but which have such a low friction to signing up that you wind up with bunches of accounts across an organization without realizing it.

Finance departments already tend to have the software purchase cycle fairly well managed, but SaaS/PaaS/IaaS doesn't fit nicely into those procedures. Because of that, we're building our tools to play nice with others, so whether your finance group is managing things in Excel or you have a fancy SAP based system we're working to make it easier to get this data where it needs to be.

Re: 68% of the Fortune 100 are Clueless

#13

Post by krobertson »

kevinpet wrote: post #9

My first thought was "is there any actual content in among the buzzwords". My second thought was "what's he trying to sell". Apparently, cloudability is a service that allows you to track your "cloud" spending, which seems totally useless to me. I mean, why should I track SaaS and Amazon S3 backups in the same category, but leave off $1000 Yourkit license in some other category?

I agree... the post just has a sensationalized title. He was just missing his company's pitch at the end.

Re: 68% of the Fortune 100 are Clueless

#16

Post by bennylope »

stormental wrote: post #2

Our post on how "rogue" cloud services are making their way into the Fortune 100/500/50 ... a response to 37Signals blog.

What makes Basecamp "cloud"? There's a material difference between software delivered as a service and ephemeral IT infrastructure (cloud computing).

Re: 68% of the Fortune 100 are Clueless

#18

Post by jfrisby »

thyrsus wrote: post #15
InclinedPlane wrote: post #14

So does "the cloud" mean "web applications or services" now?

I can't improve on this: http://everythingsysadmin.com/2011/06/avoid-using-the-term-c...

That's precisely how we look at it internally -- IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. We speak in terms of "the cloud", as coarse and imprecise a term as it is, because that's what a lot of the people we're trying to reach are thinking in terms of and looking for. Plus, it just flows more smoothly than "IaaS/PaaS/SaaS" in a headline. :)

Re: 68% of the Fortune 100 are Clueless

#19

Post by phaedrus »

wccrawford wrote: post #5
stormental wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd counter that if Company X learns that they're employees are using Basecamp at $99/mo to actually get things done rather than a much more expensive tool that team members don't want to use, the company has gained a valuable insight into how they can save a lot of money (and make their team's life easier). Call me a dreamer but I believe everyone wins on the cloud.

I worked at a company that had invested big $$$ into an agile tool without consulting the teams if it was adequate for their needs. For a month or 2, the teams used the tool as required. Eventually, when the boss turned his back, each team quietly found a tool. Because they were being quiet, each team found a different tool from every other team. They were actually tracking their progress in both systems, but the exp…

I think this is a common occurrence with government IT spending too. I worked as an electronics engineer for a short time as a contractor. They paid huge sums for some software archiving / source control / versioning program that can't actually handle merging (if I work on version 2 and check in my version becomes version 3. If you were also working on version 2 and check in version 3, you overwrite my changes, unless we worked on different files. It is as if the people who implemented it didn't really know what version control is supposed to do). So everyone ignores it and uses git or svn ti develop, and only copies to the expensive official program when coerced. When we tried to explain to management why we used svn instead, management flatly refused to believe merging source control a la svn could work in principle.

Re: 68% of the Fortune 100 are Clueless

#20

Post by stormental »

bennylope wrote: post #16
stormental wrote: post #2

Our post on how "rogue" cloud services are making their way into the Fortune 100/500/50 ... a response to 37Signals blog.

What makes Basecamp "cloud"? There's a material difference between software delivered as a service and ephemeral IT infrastructure (cloud computing).

I think of cloud using @davenielsen's OSSM description: services that are On-Demand, Self-Service, Scalable, Measureable. https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/d8...
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