I sat in on a great webinar the other day titled “The Real Truth About Cloud, SaaS and Saving Money Now”. This was presented by Daryl Plummer of Gartner as part of their Webinar series.
There were a lot of very interesting topics covered. First and foremost, he provides a clear definition of cloud computing. Gartner’s definition is “a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ to external customers using Internet Technologies”.
Let me start by saying that I’m not a baseball umpire. You should also know that in no way am I a Yankees fan. In fact, I’d probably lean more towards a Yankee hater than a fan. I am a sports official and will typically take the umpire’s side of most arguments.
A signing that many are applauding, Marian Hossa to the Chicago Blackhawks, may actually be one of the worst so far. To start with, let’s look at the length of the contract. It’s a 12 year deal and Hossa is already 30 years old. Some quick math tells me that he’d be 42 if he played to the end of his contract. Barring some significant advances in medicine, I just don’t see this happening. Looking at the numbers, confirms that the length of the contract would seem to be solely to give Hossa the money upfront without the cap hit that would come with a shorter contract. According to multiple sources, the contract pays him $7.9 million for the first 7 years, $4 million in the 8th year, $1 million in years 9 and 10, and $750K in the final two years. This gives him a cap number of just over $5.16 million per year. Compare this to the contract for Martin Havlat, who was unable to reach a contract because the Hawks did not want to offer more than one year, and Havlat’s 6 year, $30 million contract has a cap hit of $5 million. Havlat went 29-48-77-+29 and Hossa went 40-31-71-+27. So, the Hawks get 11 goals, lose 17 assists and a team leader. But, they do get to spend $2.9 million more for that. Let’s not forget their playoff performances this past season. Hossa was non-existent for most of the playoffs (though he did have 15 points in 23 games) while Havlat was consistently a spark for the young Hawks (15 points in 16 games). Let’s also not forget that Havlat is 2 years younger than Hossa.
It seems as though every company that offers a web based or SaaS product is now claiming that they are offering it in the cloud. But are they? Based on what I can tell, it seems like most just have your typical data center. Sure, they may have great features like multiple mirrored locations in case of outages, backups and all the other bells and whistles that come with both a data center and a cloud, but, are they “in a cloud”?
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