Your Position in the Cloud Ecosystem

[#1]

For a company that wants to provide cloud services; Larry Carvalho, who led Cloud boot camp, at the Cloud Computing Expo in New York last week, suggested determining your position in the cloud ecosystem by mapping offerings with the target segment’s expectations.

The consumers ask for: easy to use, freemium, privacy, fast access, openness, security, a rich browser experience, availability and reliability. Facebook is one of the products that respond to this demand.

The mid-market customers ask for: SaaS solutions, hosting, business processes, cloud collaborating, reliability and availability. FedEx responded to this demand with “email to shipping integration”.

The large-market customers ask for: private clouds, business processes, test and development, faster time to market, data integration, compliance and security, fast access, a chargeback mechanism, service provisioning, cloud  collaboration, migration and performance. Cloud integration vendors respond to this demand with various service offers.

ISVs ask for: new revenue streams, multi tenant capabilities, economy to scale, reliable hosting, end to end platforms, elasticity, billing and business agility. Google responded with the Google Apps Developer Program Site.

Startups ask for: cloud platform, built-in billing capability, revenue sharing, multi-tenant capable and low cost entry. Amazon Web Services “Start-up Challenges” was a response to this demand. Other cloud marketplaces (Google Apps Marketplace, Intuit market, etc.) are a good place for startups to monetize their solutions.

Larry recommended to keep your cloud awareness high as this is a continuously evolving area with many innovations and risks.

Many companies want to jump onto the wagon to offer Cloud services. It's important to determine your target segment(s) and to know the need of your customers. Amazon shared its experience in the keynote of the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Summit 2011:

"The key to our success is listening to our customers". Their success is clear. Each day AWS adds the equivalent server capacity to power Amazon when it was a global $2.76B enterprise (circa 2000).

What is your position in the Cloud Ecosystem? What is your cloud awarness?

[#2]

A good resource to follow cloud computing trend -  http://www.cloudcamp.org/

[#3]

Thanks for posting this info and choosing this topic for blog.  

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ecosystem grow as fast as the Cloud Computing Ecosystem. It is challenging but blessing for Startup Company. Using public cloud to start with idea and allow to grow become easier due to freely available cloud vendor. Thanks to Amazon, Google etc. This helps small business to build confidence; if business depends on heavy money transaction then choosing private cloud is good choice.