5 Worst Cloud Washers Of 2011

Many vendors want to be cloud vendors. The cloud has come to connote flexibility, scalability, and economy of scale. Wouldn’t you want those attributes to be on your side when you’re trying to make the sale? There’s just one problem.

Despite the fact that some parts of the cloud are loosely defined, not everybody is bringing products to market worthy of the name “cloud.” As a matter of fact, there’s a lot of cloud washing–renaming existing products, after a few tweaks, with the word cloud inserted.

John Cullinane, former chairman of Cullinane Software, started the trend many years ago, when he took a pretty good database product, IDMS, and in the midst of an emerging, relational database technology trend, renamed it IDMS-R. “There,” he said. “We’re relational too.”

To actually be part of the cloud requires systems that run on a simplified data center architecture, operated largely by automated policies, not human hands. The architecture allows end users to self-provision their own servers, and has a billing mechanism that allows the supplier to charge only for the resource used, not the lifetime software license cost.

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