Don’t forget, in the Cloud it’s about money

There is no shortage of tweeting about the cloud. Sometimes it is downright overwhelming even. For the most part, the tweets reference articles and blog posts about the cloud. Sometimes there are dialogues about some of the finer technical points in the various iterations of cloud computing. But every once in a while there is a nugget of pure truth boiled down to 140 characters or less that causes you to think.

I came across one of those nuggets this morning. It was from Reuven Cohen, founder of Enomaly and the Elastic Vapor Blog. Reuven tweeted:

The central pitch to service providers in implementing a cloud platform is preventing revenue leakage and additional revenue generation.

Think about it. We talk about public vs private clouds. We talk about this virtualization platform or that one. We talk about what the service providers of tomorrow should be doing. Will Cloud computing be as big as everyone says it will be? It all boils down to money. Making it, losing it or saving it. If there is not a monetary incentive, it doesn’t happen.

So as Rueven says in his tweet, service providers will implement cloud platforms to prevent losing customers and money or making more money. The same logic holds true for customers moving their data and applications to the cloud. If it will save them money and allow them to make more money, they will do it. If there is not an economic advantage to it, it won’t flourish.

So we can talk clouds, IaaS, PaaS, private, public, elastic and all the rest. But at the end of the day, cloud comes down to the dollars and cents.

Happy 4th of July weekend to everyone!