

68% of the Fortune 100 are Clueless - stormental
http://cloudability.com/blog/68-of-the-fortune-100-are-clueless

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kevinpet
My first thought was "is there any actual content in among the buzzwords". My
second thought was "what's he trying to sell". Apparently, cloudability is a
service that allows you to track your "cloud" spending, which seems totally
useless to me. I mean, why should I track SaaS and Amazon S3 backups in the
same category, but leave off $1000 Yourkit license in some other category?

~~~
krobertson
I agree... the post just has a sensationalized title. He was just missing his
company's pitch at the end.

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div
> We need better tools that let companies understand and budget for the cloud
> money they are already spending while at the same time letting end users
> sign up for the services they need to do their jobs.

This kind of tool would be aimed at precisely the market that would never pay
for it.

If employees need to circumvent company policy to use Basecamp, the only way
in which such a tool would be used is to identify culprits and get them back
in line.

edit: on the other hand I would love a startup to prove me wrong :)

~~~
stormental
I'd counter that if Company X learns that they're employees are using Basecamp
at $99/mo to actually get things done rather than a much more expensive tool
that team members don't want to use, the company has gained a valuable insight
into how they can save a lot of money (and make their team's life easier).
Call me a dreamer but I believe everyone wins on the cloud.

~~~
wccrawford
I worked at a company that had invested big $$$ into an agile tool without
consulting the teams if it was adequate for their needs. For a month or 2, the
teams used the tool as required. Eventually, when the boss turned his back,
each team quietly found a tool. Because they were being quiet, each team found
a different tool from every other team. They were actually tracking their
progress in both systems, but the expensive one was only being updated
afterwards. Everyone would sit around the easy-to-use tool and plan things,
and then 1 unlucky soul had to transcribe it into the crappy tool. This
actually sped things up because the crappy tool would waste time x5, where the
combination of tools only wasted time x1. (And we usually got a non-developer
to do the transcribing, too.)

Eventually, the whole thing came to light and the company was forced to admit
how stupid they were being.

See, they had paid for a year's service of the bad tool, and they were adamant
that they get their money's worth. They were absolutely blind to how much
money they were wasting daily. The sunk cost was sunk. There was no way to
recover from that, and the tool just couldn't be salvaged.

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JonLim
Curious: after the year of service was up, did the company decide to go with
one of the other tools you guys found, or did they keep dropping stupid money?

~~~
wccrawford
After about 5 or 6 months of that nonsense, they discovered the deception
(because we let them in on it... that was a nervous moment, and I got to break
the news. lucky me!) and they finally relented and stopped pestering us about
the tool they paid too much for. All the teams agreed fairly quickly that 1
particular tool was better, and we all standardized on it.

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jnorthrop
The surprising thing to me is the lack of concern over the security of cloud
services. There are real risks in not having proper data segregation or even
know in which country your data is stored in. Or what the security at the data
center(s) is like.

Subverting the bureaucratic channel at a large corporation to "get on the
cloud" must drive the CPO and CSO nuts. There is a time and place for
bureaucracy.

~~~
billswift
More accurately, there is a time and place for controls and discipline. You
can have both without actual bureaucracy, or, more commonly, bureaucracy with
neither of desirable ends.

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dmk23
You might think they are clueless but there is a method to IT's madness. I
would not recommend publicly trashing anybody in corporate buying chain if you
ever plan to go upscale and sell your services for 7 figures at CIO's level.
Nobody appreciates being publicly called a fool.

CIO's job is to manage massive resources and organizations - first and
foremost to keep the critical line-of-business systems running. For most of
them cloud right now is neither the top priority nor a viable substitute for
core infrastructure. You are right on with your strategy to get foot in the
door to circumvent their slow-moving processes. However you should be thinking
of how to work yourself into their higher-level planning process instead of
positioning yourself as adversary of their corporate policy by calling it
stupid.

Just remember, the CIOs have the power to ban technologies that sneak out
through the back door. Alienate them at your own peril!

EDIT: Whoever down voted this, please post an actual substantive rebuttal.

~~~
nickolai
>Just remember, the CIOs have the power to ban technologies that sneak out
through the back door. Alienate them at your own peril!

I agree about the general idea of not throwing stones into the sky. They have
a tendency to fall back down on one's nose.

However banning tools that were 'snuck in through the back door' because of
their efficiency and because nobody had the heart to follow the actual
procedure to get them through the front door strikes me as profoundly
childish. Especially if it is done as some sort of vengeance, or 'just because
we can'. In fact about just as childish as throwing stones into the sky.

I'm being a bit idealistic here. There will always be turf wars in BigCos. But
hey if some people switched from trying to look like the best and brightest to
getting stuff done instead, i'd be all for it.

~~~
dmk23
My point was not whether "banning tools that were 'snuck in through the back
door'" is childish or fair or unfair. That's not even relevant. The point was
that they have the power to do this and they do not hesitate to use it.
Occasionally they even have valid reasons related to security and business
continuity. Remember how all those defense / intelligence secrets walked out
of the door on a USB stick and ended up on Wikileaks?

There is no place for idealism in selling to BigCos. You have to work through
the process and build your case or someone else will steal your deal, possibly
with an inferior product.

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stormental
Our post on how "rogue" cloud services are making their way into the Fortune
100/500/50 ... a response to 37Signals blog.

~~~
bennylope
What makes Basecamp "cloud"? There's a material difference between software
delivered as a service and ephemeral IT infrastructure (cloud computing).

~~~
stormental
I think of cloud using @davenielsen's OSSM description: services that are On-
Demand, Self-Service, Scalable, Measureable.
[https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/d8...](https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/d8524a57-3a71-4212-93e6-29a440e8f425/entry/dave_nielsen_explains_why_cloud_computing_is_ossm_awesome?lang=en)

~~~
ericd
You're just talking about hosted software, then. That's been around since the
90s...

Using Cloud to mean abstracted server infrastructure is much more useful.
Otherwise it's just a meaningless catch-all marketing term.

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gersh
So, how do you pitch the CIO on something the company is already using?

Salesperson: This software is so easy and ... CIO: Won't it be a big learning
curve Saleperson: Well, actually, your company is already using our software

~~~
dmk23
Exactly.

What you pitch them is on buying larger license for the whole enterprise,
increasing the usage and integrating deeper into their systems.

Getting from a handful of users to thousands is easier to do when you have
both initial end user champions and the support of IT.

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InclinedPlane
So does "the cloud" mean "web applications or services" now?

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thyrsus
I can't improve on this:

[http://everythingsysadmin.com/2011/06/avoid-using-the-
term-c...](http://everythingsysadmin.com/2011/06/avoid-using-the-term-cloud-
com.html)

~~~
jfrisby
That's precisely how we look at it internally -- IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. We
speak in terms of "the cloud", as coarse and imprecise a term as it is,
because that's what a lot of the people we're trying to reach are thinking in
terms of and looking for. Plus, it just flows more smoothly than
"IaaS/PaaS/SaaS" in a headline. :)

~~~
InclinedPlane
I like the terms *aaS, but I don't they don't exactly roll of the tongue
(either four syllables or a too generic term that sounds silly and is easily
confused with other things).

