It’s been a while since I had something on my mind that I could and will share 🙂
This time it’s around IaaS ..infrastructure as a service. The last 6 months I have been involved in several types of projects that in some way all touches IaaS in some format and now after 6 months I’m reflecting over my experiences and are quite surprised to find how bad that market still is.
There are now a large number out there that offers IaaS in some way or another but I have not yet met a supplier that was actually really focused on bringing value to a customer on all the right parameters. That segment is at the moment highly focused on the savings it gives the supplier and not the value of the service which means a lot of customers are ending up with a bad experience.
So what should the focus be?
In my opinion the supplier needs to focus on pure IaaS first – many are bundling IaaS, PaaS and SaaS into a package that actually removes some customers from the idea.
We have to remember we have been used to have everything under our own control for a long while so it is very hard to let go of many things at one time. If a customer could choose to go purely IaaS right now without worrienging about any other services the first hurdle would be gone.
Secondly the quality of the IaaS is appalling many places – not so much in the specifics but more on the flexibility of the solution. Again we are talking about customers having to release control over something they deem important so it is not helpful when a supplier removes more control than needed. Give a customer flexibility to a certain degree and he will feel that he get the value from both worlds.
My take on a good service would be where you build on a scaleable flexible infrastructure and combine it with a flexible frontend customer portal where the portal would focus on giving the tools the customer needs to feel like the IaaS is really just an extension of his own infrastructure.
Of course this is easy to say – one of the key elements here will be to create that flexible scaleable infrastructure as effective as possible as you will need to spend most of your resources on development and customer facing support.
This is possible today if you do not lock your selv in with one vendor on any level.
Storage, network, software etc. – don’t choose one vendor only strategy ..they all have good AND bad sides and only a mix will give you what you need.
Instead make sure you have “independent” advisors that does not sell products as that is the only way you will be able to compare the different elements on the right level.
A vendor will always highlight his strong points compared to the competition and that is his job and nothing should change there. As a customer we just need to know this and therefore accept that as it is and then turn to advisors that does not sell a product to ensure it fits with the primary needs of the business. We cannot put that task on a vendor no matter how good they are. It is the resposibility of the customer to ensure bussiness needs are met .. not a vendor.