Cloud is so big that practically every IT provider is offering some sort of cloud services. Certainly the internet has subsumed so many aspects of business that IT would not be an exception. The offerings of cloud computing are loosely classified into newer buzzwords like Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Different cloud providers seek to differentiate their offering by providing different aspects of each and there are prime examples in each category of cloud offerings.
I was looking at alternatives for hosting a server and thought to look at the offerings from various cloud providers. I remember Sun Microsystem used to tort US$1/CPU/hour for what was their grid offering. That was a fantastic pricing metric. It, in fact, set my expectation that cloud providers should be at least as transparent as hosting providers with their costing.
Amazon's EC2 was great. I could work out how much its service was to cost me. In fact, I could even work out the costs given different usage scenarios. I had to be careful with network transfer costs but at least Amazon was forthcoming with the costs.
Microsoft's Azure pretty much had the same transparency. The cost is quite clear after mapping out the requirements. So is Google's AppEngine or Google App, and Salesforce.com.
Things start to go downhill from there. I could not get any price info online for IBM's smartcloud. It says "Call our sales representative". HP did not even say what their cloud platform really offers. They likely want you to "Call our sales representative". I would have expected Oracle, the company that bought Sun, to get it right. No. Oracle now says "Call our sales representative".
It gets me thinking.. what exactly is so complicated about pricing a cloud computing solution that a sales representative is a nagging requirement? Isn't cloud supposed to be a turnkey solution where the customer just goes online and pay for computing as a utility.
By layering the pricing behind a sales representative, agility, one of the best feature of cloud computing, is lost. I will not expect the sales representative to present a simple sales pricing but the customer will likely be faced with a hotchpotch of legalese. The final solution likely tie the customer into the provider's solution with an expensive exit clause and some minimum required utilisation. How different is this from getting your own server hosted? In fact, "call our sales representative" is less transparent than traditional hosting service providers who usually put their price list online.
0 Reactions:
Post a Comment