I originally wrote this in response to a blog post by Rob Hirschfeld on his blog post titled “Why cloud compute will be free”. My take on this is that in general higher volume of data at a cloud provider less likely that client will move to another provider, but in some cases cloud usage can be compute intense (compute can cost more than data storage). For example for testing a microprocessor simulation you can spin up 200 nodes for 4 hours and bring these down, input data more or less will remain constant and outputs are not heavy either. In these types of scenarios cloud is a great fit, as it cuts down time of testing a microprocessor simulation from 4 days to 4 hours (for example sake).
I don’t think stickiness of clients will be due to their data volume, I think stickiness will be due a mix of several factors (of which data can be one) and these will differ based on verticals and use cases. Few things which are important to enterprises are: quality of service, consultative approach to service delivery, integration with existing enterprise infrastructure, vendor’s ability to innovate and vendor’s understanding of client’s requirements/challenges. Having said that, I strongly agree that cloud providers which throw out some free services (testing the waters) will do much better in attracting and retaining clients. After all, humans will pick which cloud to go to and if they are well versed in one vendor’s technology/process/offerings they will prefer that vendor over others. Technique of throwing a free evaluation licensing out there (for six months or so) was mastered by Microsoft and that was secret behind dominance of languages like VB in 1990s. Later this technique was copied by other vendors like Oracle and they are benefiting from it (SAP ignore it and see where they are now).
Another twist I would like to add here is; a vendor’s treatment of developer community which is closely related to my point on free service for limited time, vendors who will make it easy for developers to write code to their cloud services (from integration to new applications through programmable infrastructure and platform as a service) will win in the long term. Keep in mind; what makes data valuable is the processing of data which is done through applications which are written by developers at large. More love a cloud provider shows to developers more love they will get back…
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I was about to say: Is there really any difcerenfe? An MSP can deliver Cloud Services, both public, private and hybrids, depending on their offer? A Managed Service is most often assumed to be connected to a physical device but all services has to be managed by someone at some point, even Cloud Services. But to keep things apart I would say it is easier to keep the definition Managed Service when managing a physical device, even though it can be part of a cloud solution, and then often a private cloud. But why should a service be defined as a Managed Service if systems is connected to a physical server and as an Cloud if a system is connected to virtual server? That definition is new to me. At our company (TeleComputing) most of our services are Managed Services mainly delivered in or through private clouds. We deliver Managed Clients (DaaS) but they are managed from a SCCM ran on a VM. I “assume” this is an IBM-site but if we take Win Intune as an example it is a cloud service managing OS on physical clients. So maybe; is there really any difcerenfe? InMaxmind.com
This is really a trikcy question, very useful to solicit discussions but it is also a wrong question. From an IT perspective managed services are any kind of service that is provided by a third party to which IT transfer the ownership of service cost and risk after having negotiated a service level (SLA) and a price. Cloud Computing is a specific consumption and delivery model for IT services. From an enterprise IT perspective Cloud Computing can become a type of managed services when an external provider is involved. Different conditions can occur, the external provider can for example:- manage a client-owned on premise private cloud- host and manage a client-owned private cloud- manage public cloud services for multiple clients
I personally as well do not agree that maenagd services is restricted only to physical devices and cloud computing is only about virtualisation.From my perspective maenagd services is a broad term and reflects literally the ‘maenagd service’, its a maenagd services for what ever it be (e.g. email, physical (or virtual) servers, security, storage or as you mentioned service which helps people to manage their cloud services.)Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).So from my perspective, maenagd services is just a transactional services for operation/management of certain things (hardware, software or systems), where as cloud computing is about delivery of service (mostly) over internet with different facets such as Business process as Service, SaaS, IaaS or PaaS. Clould computing architecture as well clearly defines ways to manage and operate the cloud and related serices.
In my opinion, Cloud envmnonierts and especially PaaS and SaaS offerings should be manage free and automated to the maximum extend. This will results in easier to manage environment for the provider, and a better SLA performance for the end-user with less time spend waiting on provisioning, maintenance, downtime etc.