Big IT and the Clouds

Tying a couple folks blog posts together. James Robertson on SimpleDB, etc....

Bypassing IT just went from being somewhat painful to being a line item in your budget.

And Bill de hÓra on pretty much the same subject...

This seems to me like the desktop computer revolution of the eighties or the email/web of the ninties - consumer tech that infects the enterprise.

Yep. Like the Apple II and Viscalc just showing up in the office because they could get a job done. Like the Mosaic browser just showing up in the office because... oh, wait, that was for porn. But like the sales dept signing their own deal with Saleforce because someone's IT could not get a job done.

I suspect large enterprises will find their way to the clouds in fits and starts, mostly from outsiders being able to get a job done and that job can be paid for on a meter. At some point there will be pressure from Sales, or from Marketing, or even Accounting, to integrate with the cloud.

Certainly by that time CEOs or someone should be asking IT why their costs are so damn high and progress so awfully slow compared to all those new systems that run in the clouds. In 2007 we could finally see that ws-* will end sooner rather than later. Now we are starting to see that the big IT data center will also be shorter lived than at least I imagined a year or two ago. It won't be soon, and it won't be painless, but at least now we have the end in our sights and we can start taking aim for that goal.