Note to Cloud Service Providers - The Network is The Cloud

I was catching up on some reading this weekend nursing a sunburn, and was absolutely blown away by the sheer number of 'Cloud' companies and what they are offering. I have covered Cloud in this blog repeatedly because I don't get it. I don't get what Cloud does that Managed Services Providers do with a reconstructed SLA. When I read in an eWeek piece that we need to 'stop defining what the cloud is and look at what it does' then I knew there are a lot of other people who don't get it, who want to get it, and since the industry can't come up with the single *right* answer, we call in Officer Barbrady to manage things 'Nothing to see here. Move along people...' and hope to move on without a definition in place.

Would you pay for something without knowing what it is AND does? In the words of Max from the movie The Losers 'it's like giving a loaded gun to a six year old Wade, you're not sure how t's going to end but you're pretty sure it's going to make the papers.' Is it a Zen thing? The cloud is, but will not be...? What is a simple truth? What are any of us sure of?

I am sure of one thing - that networks are the most overlooked component of the thing referred to as Cloud. Why? Simple? Imagine if there were no public roads between the airport and the car rental places, only taxi approved roads, or that you had to pay $10 to ride teh shuttle bus. You would incure a small fortune getting you and your stuff from one place to another to pay for the priviledge of renting something for as long as you needed it so you could move around.

I could play with that metaphor for a long time and won't, it's Monday. What I will say is that the Cloud providers need to understand networks so that they stay competitive, provide more value than the next guy, and if nothing else - they could offer the same pricing as Amazon's service and capture 38-48% more margin.

That should make the papers...