I was naturally interested in Monday’s
InfoWorld Story titled “Startups
take SAP consulting to the cloud” that discusses cumulusIQ and another
company.
One of the questions I wish had been
answered in greater detail is: What makes a service cloud-based? Is it just technical support over the
network? That’s not new. In 1980 Digital Equipment Corporation
introduced remote system diagnosis over a network (for the VAX 11/750).
What’s different and exciting about the
cloud is that it delivers Knowledge as a Service (KaaS). KaaS is the culmination of the most important
Web 2.0 concepts, like crowd sourcing, software as a service, virtualization,
long tail, pull versus push, and on-demand.
In KaaS, users are not hardwired to a
single group of consultants and are not even buying consulting from a vendor
(unless you call the individual consultants vendors). That would be far too
limiting. Instead, users buy knowledge
from sellers in a global marketplace in real time. Any number of people can participant --
consultants to make money and gain recognition; users to acquire knowledge when
and where they need it without paying for “extras” like onsite visits they
don’t need.
One further comment on the story: Jon Reed is quoted as saying that cloud
services are a “creature of the recession.”
How negative is that? It implies
that our customers use us because they’re broke. But obviously there are many situations when
obtaining knowledge on-demand from a global pool makes more sense than getting
it from a hardwired resource (whether onsite or remote). It is more accurate to say the cloud is a
“creature of innovation.”
