Three months ago I started this LinkedIn discussion and I keep getting comments about it. People might say that it is just a defiant question for marketing purposes. I say that this question raises many thoughts and opinions that helps marking the strategy of an IT organization. I invite you to read the following comments that can bring you to think a bit more about your current On-Demand strategy and approach.

> > > > > Answer #1: Just a Buzzword

It’s a buzzword. This is a 70’s-80’s technologies evolution. Remember mainframes, VM/370, per-time payments when using machine. Just another evolutionary loop, development of already existent technologies. In my opinion Cloud computing is an evolution. Started with the revolution of Grid computing, then Utility computing, SAAS computing and now it finds its preliminary conclusion in Cloud computing. Thus no it is not a revolution, it is a revolutionary step in the evolution of what is now called Cloud computing. This is just a good name for number of technologies that was ready years before than customers are become ready for it and useful software was written. Many companies added “Cloud” to the titles of their solutions. Any site can be marked “Cloud ready” or “SaaS solution” 🙂 It means that it’s only marketing. This all is possible because people don’t know what Cloud is in details; sellers often talk about it as about some magic. You can use Magic instead of Cloud; meaning stays the same – marketing.

> > > > > Answer #2 : Depends! From the technology perspective: Evolution and from the business point: Revolution

“From a technology point of view I am pretty positive about categorizing it as evolution and not even sure if representing a significant step; from a business standpoint however I think there is much more value in the concept. I believe that Cloud Computing introduces a capability to rapidly map dynamic changes in the business models that is kind of revolutionary”

“My observation is that “cloud” is a description of how IT is supposed to work from a business perspective: flexible, available, efficient (lower cost), secure, dynamic, responsive, etc. If you are an IT specialist, the technology is evolutionary, but the thinking may be revolutionary.”

“I tend to think that the cloud computing Revolution will transform the way all businesses interface include enterprises with technology and communications, and marks the next wave of the fundamental changes that the evolution of the internet has already brought about the Tera Play”

> > > > > Answer #3: IaaS just an Evolution. Massive Scaling, supported by PaaS and SaaS, is the Revolution.

“I’ve seen global Trading and risk systems, (30,000 node compute grids, nano second trading platforms), some true cutting edge platforms. And this is really a complete transformation of IT. If you’re thinking just IaaS then it’s just evolutionary. True SaaS and PaaS is a revolution. The fact that Salesforce (and the force.com platform) can deliver millions of users and 97500 customers on a single multi-tenant platform with three major upgrades per year. That’s the power of the cloud. Giving a small 10 user non-profit the same reach and scale as a multibillion dollar organisation. The cloud. No admin or maintenance, pure development and software business process IP. What other technology can scale from 1 to 100,000 users. It can take much less than 10% of the traditional development to build a SaaS app compared to traditional platforms. Cheaper , faster AND better . That’s a revolution. “

“The prior comment reflects a deep misunderstanding about what timeshared (outsourced) mainframe computing was all about. Cloud is just another swing in the pendulum. The business owners in the 60’s were right: why should we buy and maintain our own computers when we can better spend the money by renting the computing resources from somebody who knows how to take care of all that “stuff”? It’s not new. We’re just coming around to the fact that PC computing set the industry back 40 years and we’re now where we would have been if PCs had not taken 25 years to “grow up”.

“As amorphous as this question might be, the analogy to mainframes is highly misplaced and not very useful. Among other defining characteristics, cloud services allow software developers to control infrastructure resources programmatically. This means that applications specifically designed for cloud environments can bypass the historically slow and error prone layer of IT administrators that maintain computing resources through largely manual, error prone processes. Companies that use such functionality to enable auto-scaling, such as Netflix, are doing so without the need to invest capital into stranded computing capacity that may or may be fully subscribed. I’ll leave the ever so important question of evolution vs. revolution to you, but explain to me how the Netflix development team could have replicated their “

“Revolution – Cloud is a disruption of everything internet and application as we know them. The very large infrastructure and service vendors are racing to rework their offers and slow things down to keep their competitive advantage. Revolutions are messy – like a massive earthquake or coup d etat. Evolution is what you study afterwards when learning which creatures adapted and which went extinct.”

> > > > > Revolution by Wikipedia takes place in a short period of time

“According to the Wikipedia definition: A revolution (from the Latin revolutio, “a turnaround”) is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time. So how this aligned with the “Cloud Computing Revolution” that doesn’t seem to come up in a short period of time?… I remind you that Amazon started its AWS 11 years ago… ” I asked

“Ofir – most revolutions have a long lead up time where the angst ferments underground and bursts out in a moment of time when the underlying ability to organize action is catalyzed by some event – Egypt for example (mobile devices & Facebook). Think of the internet revolution in 1995-1997. The internet was slowly building out (DARPA net, etc) with organization by the scientific/defense communities and catalyzed by Tim Berner Lee public gift of http/html. The corporate world was seeking a way to collaborate beyond the bonds of one company’s offer, like IBM & MSFT. Within two years the Internet exploded into the corporate world, literally revolutionizing the ways companies marketed themselves. The coup was over when Bill Gates announced that Msft was an Internet company and Netscape dropped $25 in a day!”

This month Christian Verstraete, HP’s Chief Technologist also raised this question in the CIO magazine. In his post he writes:

“One of the questions that came on the table was whether cloud computing is a revolution, a paradigm shift, or not. I’d like to answer, it’s both.

I say that the cloud computing is Evolving faster to become a Revolution,

what do you think ? Join the discussion