Page 214 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

younger people take to the disruptive technology and imple-
ment it, while their elders hold back, satisfied that what they’ve
got is good enough.
“Discovering markets for emerging technologies inher-
ently involves failure, and most individual decision makers find
it very difficult to risk backing a project that might fail because

the market is not there,” Christiansen warns, and you begin to
see why the disruptive technology creeps up on so many com-
panies unawares.
Smart people are already seizing on the possibilities of
cloud computing and putting it to use in ways that many es-
tablished businesses can’t foresee. Passionate individuals who
suddenly realize that the cloud provides them with an avenue

to do something that they’ve always wanted to do—research a
problem, assemble a team, or produce a service—will find ways
to do it in the cloud. Small companies with an instinct for what
can be done and a knack for creating a profitable cloud serv-
ice will find venture capital backing.

Tomorrow’s Scenarios

As this is being written, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud
(EC2) is three years old and rapidly maturing. In the midst
of a severe recession, not everybody is paying attention. Cut-
ting costs has been the mentality that has dominated the land-
scape for the last two years and may continue to assert itself
deep into 2010. Perhaps some companies will start to consider
the possibilities of cloud computing as the economy revives.

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