Over the years, we’ve continued to evaluate Clouds as an option for delivering point services to our customers – but the economics havn’t justified a switch.

What is often overlooked by SaaS pundits is the fact that connecting to a Cloud very often reduces (sometimes eliminates) key features that a private SaaS vendor can provide. For example, we looked hard at augmenting our file storage with cloud storage via Amazon (and a few other vendors) but decided against it for two main reasons:

1. Vendor Economics. Yes, economics. The transactional access of files and data that our customers require as active collaborators was a very expensive alternative. Remember, we are talking about Terabytes and Terabytes of data that we host for our clients. Sure, Cloud storage/services are cost-effective for nascent startups trying to save money ( I get it…I really do), but onec you develop into a serious business with lots of paying customers and transactional needs, Cloud becomes more cost prohibitive than one might imagine.

2. Feature Reduction. Moving hot data to the Cloud resulted in slower performance and a reduction of features such as the inability to easily provide full-text search for documents stored in an offsite Cloud. The bar to provide certain features “in the cloud” was more expensive than it was for us to “do it ourselves.”

I agree that we shouldn’t be dogmatic, but the economics of cloud storage and delivery have been prohibitive to us and our customers for the reasons listed above.

As a pseudo-cloud pundit myself, I’d also argue that the “open platform” Cloud services promises customers is still hedged with the “single point of failures” that we continue to see in Cloud vendors (virtually all of them have experienced extended outages with their vendors left wondering “what is going on?”).

At least when we go down…..we know why, we are in control of the situation and we can fix it ourselves……and we can tell our customers what is happening/going on. Luckily, we don’t go down very often at all: http://status.centraldesktop.com

Will we someday surpass the ability to efficiently and cheaply deliver our SaaS’s to our customers on our private stack? Perhaps, but we’ve also found that our homegrown architecture enables lower cost of goods and is becoming more and more of a competitive advantage when we look at many of our competitors.

Long live profitability!

I made a very serious attempt to bridge the perspectives in my blog post entitled “Is Enterprise 2.0 a Savior or a Charlatan? How Strategy-Driven Execution can pave the path to proving legitimate business performance” located here: http://bit.ly/3n325o

I would certainly welcome your feedback and look forward to a continued dialogue around the topic.

Best Regards,

Nenshad

If 2.0 offered a way to leap frog cultures from the pre information economy direct to 2.0 then I’d be interested in hearing it but most of the above is the same “Wow it’s gonna be great! You just gotta believe me!” It seems that Tammy has advanced the conversation so I’ll look forwards to seeing how we can build on that momentum.

Cheers,

Hat tip to Ben Kepes:……

But seriously, we’re never going to agree on this one, despite the multitude of disenfranchised and dispossessed blue collar workers in Otara and Aranui left adrift and with no option but to shop at The Warehouse thereby continuing the vicious circle.

Or are same blue collar workers miraculously going to turn into .NET developers overnight?

Time to move on, Ben. That ship sailed 20 years ago.