The summer is over - or has it just begun?
I love summer: you can have a glass of wine, sitting peacefully on a bank, or at a small restaurant by the river.
Some prefer white wine, a Sauvignon Blanc, or a Grüner Veltriner, or a Cabernet Franc Rose, or a Bardolino if it is about to have a red one. What you take depends on a lot of things: the purpose, the circumstances, your personal taste, the geo-location and so on - and this is clearly communicated by the vine producers: making you clear what sort of wine is recommended and for which occasion.
So why would you just want to sell cloud services, instead of offering the right type of it, to avoid misunderstandings and to increase the success rate?
When I was first invited to the summer conference of the Hungarian Association of IT Leaders (MVISZ) back in 2016 as the guide of my former CIO, who was the President of the Euro-CIO Association at that time, I did not know what a great event this will be.
The Event is held each year in August on a ship on the Danube River, which is pretty cool and smart as well: no one can leave until it is over: but who would want to?
They always have exciting topics: from Digital Transformation through Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to Cloud Computing.
Last time I was asked for speak the key-note to introduce the round table discussion with the title "The future of the Cloud".
You may know my point of view about this: as long as we do not have a common understanding that the "CLOUD" is just a general term for a collection of several very different services with regards e.g. to different deployment and service models, we will always be confronted with fear and false expectations of the decision makers and of potential customers.
Gartner hype cycle: no "cloud" in general on this.
All items related to "cloud" are more specific
Fortunately this is improving with the trend that finally most of CIOs understand that their main mission is not the micro-management of the technical infrastructure, but the value based communication, which gives the chance to the decision makers to compare the proposals of the different parties such as external and internal solution providers.
As it was visible from the reactions and from the round table discussion, the Hungarian IT Leaders I met on that ship did a really great job for archiving this already.
Thanks to that, I had the feeling that the summer is not over at all. It has rather just begun.