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Tim McQuillen Founder and CIO

November 17, 2008

Is Your Head in “The Cloud?”

Many different things come to mind when I hear the word “Cloud.” To be honest, the first thing that I think of is this classic Homer Simpson audio clip. My co-founder Frank Addante often said I should write a book and base every milestone or event in my life on some clip from The Simpsons (I guess that is why the show it still going strong after all these years).

In any case, back to reality. Don’t get me wrong, I think the cloud idea is fantastic. Utility computing, capacity on demand, real-time scalability are all great ideas that allow maximum flexibility, provide massive cost savings and allow companies to maximize the computing power amassed over time. The one thing I don’t like about the cloud is that it seems a lot of people are very confused about the concept. I think this is quickly being pushed into the same category as “Web 2.0” and other classics.

My opinion is that simply offering your solution as a SaaS (or Software as a Service) does not constitute “being in the cloud.” While this is an important component to this relatively new way to offer software products today and adoption rates are very high, this is not the sole concept of the cloud. I think the company rPath does a good job at laying out the base components needed for adoption of the cloud computing model.

Here's the moral to my post. Whether we have the terminology right or wrong, the goal of the cloud is extremely promising. Being an infrastructure guy, I salivate at the opportunity to architect, deploy and manage such systems. I love scale, high capacity, on-demand access and repeatability/reusability. It is also exciting to keep pushing our own technology to allow our customers more flexibility when they deploy (whether software, hardware or virtual appliance).

Posted by: Tim McQuillen at 3:37 PM
Categories: Experience , IT , IT Management , Infrastructure , Trends

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