In a post at the end of last month, Frank Gens of IDC explained that, cloud concerns notwithstanding, within a few years the Public Cloud will be a humongous source of IT services. The reason for the popularity of the public cloud will be the same reason any platform is successful: the apps. And who’s responsible for the apps? You guessed it, developers:
The online shift of the latest and greatest business solutions to the Web is happening because the Cloud is winning the war for developers: a rapidly growing number of developers see the Web as the most attractive “platform” on which to quickly and affordably deploy their solutions. It’s not a mystery: the Cloud dramatically reduces the barriers for customer adoption (and upgrade) and dramatically expands the market reach for solution developers. Can you imagine a developer of a hot new solution choosing not to deploy in a Cloud/SaaS mode? Hard to imagine. They might not do so exclusively – they may continue to also develop for the big on-premise platforms, and many will also deploy their public cloud solution as a software appliance in a private cloud. But it’s easy to see that the public cloud will be the number one deployment target for a large majority of solutions.
If you want to see where technology is going, follow the developers.
Pau for now…
Barton's Blog 
Barton,
As a developer, I can tell you that developers will follow the money. Right now, it’s clearer how you are going to make money selling a 99cent app on iTunes than writing an OpenSource app for the cloud. While I might want to develop for the cloud (and I am doing that) right now, people are willing to pay us for intranet based apps with web/mobile clients. If you can complete the circle (technology follows developers, developers follow the money, money needs to hook up to the technology somehow), you’ll really have something.
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Hey Phil,
Cloud apps don’t need to be open source or free. There are a lot of them out there right now such as Salesforce and its ecosystem that are receiving very healthy subscription revenues. iPhone and its app store are cloud based and, as you point out, allow developers to make money. I agree that developer compensation is a key requirement for the cloud to succeed.
thanks,
Barton
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Barton,
What interests me most is not the initial adoption of the cloud, but the pain and politics that will follow and the impact both will have on continued adoption.
The public cloud’s hands-off, off-site approach puts customers at a serious psychological disadvantage, in my opinion.
How might a subscriber transition from, say, Salesforce to a competing solution? Does Salesforce (or the new supplier) have the resources to do the migration? At what cost? What data is at risk of being lost or rendered unusable? What is the interim solution? Who has access to the data during the transition?
Yes, the questions are no different for internal development and migration projects, but the context is dramatically different.
Developers may prefer the public cloud but, ultimately, consumers will decide if they can stomach the loss of control. Most customers new to the cloud have yet to experience their first transition cloud-to-cloud, or product-to-product within a cloud.
As an aside, when vendors tell me about new customer wins and how pleased the customers are with their decision I tell them to come back in 6-18 months and let me know if the customer still feels the same way. Very few follow through.
Right now companies are enjoying that new cloud smell. The question on my mind is, what will happen once it wears off?
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Hi Joesph,
The question you raise around portability is an extremely important one. Call me a Pollyanna but I believe that standards will emerge for the cloud much the same way they did for the internet. I believe for cloud computing to truly be successful, they have to.
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Hi Barton,
Standards for the cloud infrastructure or standards for the applications deployed in a cloud? The difference is important.
Infrastructure standards would certainly help with challenges such as data protection or physical migration between tiers of storage. However, we still lack standards for countless types of business applications – standards which would improve portability in and out of the cloud. That, unfortunately, will not change any time soon.
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