What does a cloud company look like in 2020s?
Cloudnative companies will have a competitive advantage today and tomorrow even with decentralization coming fast - we call it the intelligent edge.
What’s a cloud company look like in the 2020s?
Now we’re not saying that the rest of the pack shouldn’t redefine cloud, they should. But we hope we can all agree that modern day cloud computing was defined in business terms by AWS. They are #1 in cloud computing – make no mistake. However, AWS is bringing the cloud into the wheelhouse of the on-prem players, cleverly saying it’s bringing AWS to the edge and that the data center is just another edge node. That’s good positioning.
But it’s not so easy. Just look at Outposts and how AWS has had to evolve it’s pricing strategy and terms. The pricing is sound but unlike true cloud pricing a customer is locked into a three year term. Now AWS Outposts pricing is probably more coherent than most as-a-service offerings that we’ve seen – but it’s just one product. Moreover, it’s going to be interesting to see how customers respond and how AWS services these edge nodes called data centers.
At any rate. AWS competitors should absolutely try to redefine cloud. By AWS moving to the edge and evolving its strategy toward hybrid, it’s opened the door for the discussion. Notwithstanding the earlier comments on Oracle, Microsoft is in the best position to re-define the definition of cloud. It has earned the right and we’ll never accuse Microsoft of cloudwashing. Google has some work to do in terms of solidifying its position in hybrid and multi-cloud along with public cloud. But remember Google probably has the largest cloud infrastructure in the world to support its advertising empire. As we’ve written, Google just needs to pull its head out of their ads and quadruple down on cloud.
But coming back to this idea of abstracting away the underlying complexity of the cloud, leveraging cloud native capabilities, building on top of the shoulders of the cloud giants and as David Floyer expressed in this chart below — moving from stateless to state-full ,integrating across clouds, advancing automation not only through the stack but across domains and ultimately using metadata to govern where workloads should live, be moved, disintegrated and re-combined with low latency…and be highly secured.
We think about this and say: 1) Is this technically feasible. Smart techies say yes and so we keep trying to dig here for signs – and definitely see some movement in this direction; and 2) We don’t think any one vendor will own this. What’s going to happen is you’ll get successes within layers of the stack.
Think about Snowflake’s data cloud. We’ll see that for storage and backup, data management, security (within different domains), applications…but without clear standards it’s going to be a challenge and – with respect to my friends at Snowflake, we might even see it in database (yes Snowflake has a long way to go to fulfill its Data Cloud vision).
The industry has a lot of work to do and to our CIO friends – you know the drill much better than we do – technology will keep relentlessly coming at you and you know how to deal with that. It’s the people and the change management and culture that are the real challenges.
But don’t screw up the tech!