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At the annual Gartner Symposium event, which draws hundreds of vendors across a variety of technology segments, it was hard to ignore the attention on cloud computing. Equally hard to ignore was the rampant cloudwashing happening here among traditional vendors and even some new providers.
That's why we're introducing "The Washies" -- an annual award given to the vendor who is the worst offender of painting over traditional IT technology with the word cloud, even though it offers little-to-none of the benefits that cloud computing brings.
The idea was inspired (by someone who will refuse to take credit) almost a year ago after we published our initial blog on cloudwashing. We held out on the award idea hoping that the act of cloudwashing would peter out after a while, but after what we saw this week and hearing the recent announcements from the likes of Oracle, it's clear that now is the time.
There are many vendors out there who have genuine cloud solutions that should be proud to use the word cloud to describe their offerings. These are the providers whose solutions help enterprises scale up and down easily, leverage shared resources to reduce complexity and innovate faster, and eliminate the need to manage commoditized infrastructure so teams can focus on new opportunities and trends. And some vendors shouldn't.
Just as the Razzies call out Hollywood's duds, this award isn't meant to be mean spirited. It's a way to poke a little fun, and call some attention to this questionable marketing tactic that creates confusion and missed expectations.
We'll be posting a voting form on our website in the next few weeks to get your vote, but first, we'd love to hear from you on the contenders. Who would you nominate? What prize should they receive in recognition of their efforts?
Too funny. We just had a "Conference on Cloud Computing" in Kansas City.
ReplyDeleteYou would think vendors would at least go to the effort of changing their PowerPoint slides if nothing else.
It should have been called a "Washies Conference" - it's hard to say who the worst offender was because it was so ridiculous. EMC, OpTier, Hitachi (who decided cloud belonged in quotes which at least seemed more honest ... talking about "cloud"), HP, Rackspace, CA Technologies, Cisco, Microsoft, Compuware, VMWare, and even Red Hat.
Red Hat at least mentioned odd sounding names like Google (just a web site), Amazon (I don't need books) and Salesforce (our company has one of those).
Cloud Washing is great for these vendors. It allows them to talk about innovation while protecting the profit margins of the status quo - the best of both worlds, well the vendors world anyway. It would be funnier if it weren't so damn expensive. How many thousands of hours are robbed from employees each week because they're fighting with outdated applications? How many weekends interrupted? Too many.
My vote would be for Microsoft. They have that TV commercial with the couple in the airport, one of them wants to watch a video which is saved on their home PC from their PC at the airport so they remote into it at which point MSFT says something about "the power of the cloud".
I agree with Joe. MS is top of the heap when it comes to relevancy through buzz word compliance. When we went down to their demo center a few months ago to hear them out on their "cloud" story, they said that the vendors are not responsible for the cloud hype; it is Gartner's fault. Really? To the cloud! :)
ReplyDeleteI'll have to add a new one, as I got some spam today from Vordel, with this in the subject line; "Add mobile and Cloud interfaces to your Siebel CRM". This one deserves extra points for putting the lipstick on the pig :)
ReplyDelete