If You’ve Never Used A Cloud, Can You Call Yourself An Expert?

A recurring challenge I have with a lot of enterprise vendor “cloud” solutions I get briefed on is that they seem to be designed and built without any real understanding of how and why customers are actually using the cloud today.  I suspect in most cases that this results from the fact that the people building these solutions have NEVER EVER used Amazon, Rackspace, or any other mainstream public cloud offering.

Chris Hoff points out his suspicion of this scenario in his frank assessment of the recently released FedRAMP documentation.

I’m unclear if the folks responsible for some of this document have ever used cloud based services, frankly.

When you gather together a group of product managers, architects, developers and self-styled strategists who have never used a public cloud, and ask them to design a cloud solution, more often than not their offering will not be a cloud solution (or any other kind of solution that customers want).  It’s not that these people are lacking in intelligence.  Rather, they lack the context provided through experience.  Oh, and many large enterprise vendors suck at the very basics of the “customer development process.”  So not only will their solution not be cloudy, it will be released to the market without them knowing this basic piece of information.