More than 200 people responded to last week’s poll: “Is a private cloud just a glorified data center?”
This week, our attention turns to the potential that the cloud computing market may become a far less diverse place as the laws of capitalism crunch out the lesser players.
Our question:
It’s not too far fetched to believe that one company could dominate the market. Does that mean IBM could not stand up to a larger force or that Oracle and the rest would fall to some dominant “lord of the clouds?”
Fellow ReadWriteCloud blogger Mike Kirkwood tackled the topic today in a post about market dominance in the cloud.A number of factors play into , including first mover advantage:
“We’re already seeing amazing things happen at first-movers like Amazon that are defining product and pricing. This gives them an advantage in fueling further growth and by learning and iterating the solutions in the market. Being first in an infrastructure-driven business will help them reach scale that others just can not reach easily – and potentially price it where others can’t match.”
But is cloud computing so interdependent that such domination is unlikely? Kirkwood makes the point that cloud computing may be more than a movement than anything else:
“Another argument against the cloud having a dominant player is its fuzzy definition. There are many parts and pieces to it, and it’s not clear today what it would mean to “win” the cloud computing market.”
What do you think?
Poll Results: Yes, A Private Cloud Is Just A Glorified Data Center
Our poll last week showed that most of you believe that a private cloud is just a glorified data center. Final results:
Commenters on our post last week said that its the architecture that is the distinguishing difference.
“At best, a virtualized data center only deals with the automated provisioning of components (virtual machines, storage, networks, etc..) needed to implement an infrastructure level Cloud. To complete the infrastructure as a service picture, a company would still need to provide self-service resource creation functionality (it is not going to cut if I need to fill a form and wait few days for my servers to be ready) and roll-out metering and billing services to “charge” its employees accordingly (using what real/funny money?)”
Any questions you’d like to see in our weekly poll? Leave a comment about the question you’d like to see and we’ll take a look.
