Thinking Out Cloud

Evaluating Cloud Computing Services: Criteria to consider

Today TechTarget published a piece I wrote for them about criteria to consider when selecting a cloud provider. Here's the opening paragraph:

Selecting a cloud computing provider is becoming increasingly complex. As cloud environments mature, many cloud providers attempt to differentiate themselves by focusing on specific aspects of their offerings, such as technology stacks or service-level agreements (SLAs). In short, not all cloud providers are created equal.

At the same time, enterprises are beginning to rely on cloud providers for hosting mission-critical applications, which raises the stakes for selecting the right cloud service. So how do organizations navigate this multifarious landscape? Below you'll find a few key factors for evaluating services as well as some resources to use.

I then go on to cover six key areas:

• Performance
• Technology stack
• SLAs and Reliability
• APIs: lock-in, community and ecosystem
• Security and compliance
• Cost

Please read the full article here.

Death of an (Enterprise) Salesman

Zack Urlocker wrote a nice piece on GigaOm about the Consumerization of IT, a topic that's near and dear to my heart, as readers of this blog probably know. The main focus of Zack's post was that enterprise software needs to be more simple and with less features, similar to consumer software and electronics.

But he also writes:

In a recent presentation, Lew Cirne, CEO of application performance management vendor New Relic, revealed the company now has 5,000 customers and just one sales rep. That’s astonishing.

Again, as regular readers of my blog probably know, this is a pet peeve of mine, which I write about often (for example, here, here and here). And it's not that astonishing if you know what's going on at many cloud and SaaS companies. You need only look at companies such as Amazon Web Services, Heroku and Twilio, to name a few,  who are enjoying similar or greater efficiencies in their sales and marketing efforts, and whose customers include large enterprises, not just SMBs (as do New Relic customers).

As full disclosure, I've worked as an advisor with New Relic, Twilio and Heroku, and am now working with companies such as Xeround, Sauce Labs and others (including large publicly-traded telco and hosting vendors), and we are successfully building similarly effective no-touch sales models.

The reason I mention this is because despite the fact that there is a now a growing list of companies wh are having success with this model in the B2B/Enterprise space, there is still much resistance to this model by boards and investors and it's a shame because they are giving their portfolio companies bad advice.

More than a year ago I wrote Marketing Cloud Computing: Uncharted Territories, but these territories are now a lot less uncharted, and we're starting to see a playbook emerge for this model. I am going to write more about this playbook in coming posts.