cloudu notebooks

Most readers will know that over the past year I have been very busy running CloudU, a broad-based Cloud education program that I created with the support of Rackspace.

A few weeks ago I took part in a really interesting roundtable discussion on focus.com. The roundtable was entitled “Enterprise Cloud Adoption – Defining (and Easing) the Barriers” and it bought together some of my favorite folks from around the Cloud space. On the roundtable we had;

I’ve spent a bunch of time arguing with people about the economics of Cloud Computing. While I don’t deny that the per-unit price of computing will come down because of Cloud Computing, I believe that focusing on cost in isolation misses the whole point of the Cloud. My contention is that Cloud Computing, as the natural progression on from outsourcing, finally allows IT to completely focus on the strategic aspects of its job, forgetting the low level maintenance stuff and instead really looking to how it can add value to the business.

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Recently a couple of announcements caught my eye that really speak to our contention that Cloud Computing democratizes IT. As we said in a previous CloudU report, Cloud Computing is facilitating a seismic shift in terms of business development. Formerly, entrepreneurs who wished to start a business had to invest significant capital into hardware and software licenses. Even the simplest of businesses required expensive software licenses, a server or two and the associated administration cost of keeping it all running. The availability of Cloud Computing solutions has led to a massive shift in the availability of computing power.