Cloud computing will create three revolutions for CIOs

Every revolution results in winners and losers. During a revolution, chaos occurs as all parties put forward their positions, attempting to convince onlookers that their view is the path forward. Meanwhile, established practices and institutions are disrupted and even overturned - perhaps temporarily or maybe permanently. Eventually, the results shake out and it becomes clear which viewpoint prevails and becomes the new established practice -- and in its turn becomes the incumbent, ripe for disruption.

This is true in technology as in every other domain. In business, we often get caught up in focusing on IT vendor as winners and losers. In the client/server revolution the winners are obvious - Microsoft and Intel. Over on the loser side stand the minicomputer vendors. This winner/loser phenomenon can be seen in every significant technology shift (and indeed, one shift's winner can become a future loser). This is understandable: we all love conflict and the vendor wars make for great press.

But CIOs must be aware of the effects of these revolutions on what makes up the vast majority of the technology industry - users. One could hazard a guess that for every pound of revenue that Microsoft products pull in, IT organisations spend 10 or 20 additional pounds (or perhaps even more) in building and running systems. By far the biggest impact of any technology revolution is that upon technology users (by which I mean those who work with the technology).

Another aspect of change is how individuals react to it. It's a cliché that "people don't like change." That's dead wrong. People accept - and even embrace - change when they see it brings a direct benefit. Look at the immediate adoption of the iPhone, I didn't see a lot of resistance to that, did you? A more nuanced understanding of people's reaction to change would interpret likely reactions based upon how the effect of the change is perceived by the individual - is it a benefit or a threat?

When it comes to organisations, it's a misreading to assume that the organisation will react as a whole - every organisation is made up of groups and individual actors, each of which will have its (or his or her) own read on the implications of a change. If we look to the original move of PCs into companies, some portions of IT organisations embraced them, while others, wedded to the existing mode of performing IT, saw them as a distraction, a threat, or a toy. In other words, there were different camps that arose in reaction to the availability of this new form of computing, and there were pitched battles for personal and organisational influence that took the guise of a technical assessment.

When it comes to cloud computing, we should expect to see the same dynamic play out. Over the next two to five years, expect to see enormous conflict about the technical pros and cons of cloud computing that will be motivated by the perception on the part of the participants as to whether cloud computing represents a benefit to be embraced or a threat to be resisted.

In particular, cloud computing's three characteristics - the illusion of infinite scalability, lack of a long-term commitment, and pay-by-the-use - will result in three revolutions in the way IT is performed, and each of the revolutions will have its adherents and detractors.

Revolution #1: The Change in IT Operations

Much is made of the magic of Amazon Web Services - fill out a web page, hit a button, and 10 minutes later, you've got computing resources available. Even more impressive, you can obtain large amounts with that request. And later, should you need even more resources to be added to your original pool, they're easily requested and joined to the existing resources. This is the vision that many find so tantalizing, given today's lengthy provisioning cycle, which in many companies results in months-long gaps between request and resource availability. Many think removing all the friction of resource provisioning is a huge win. One might think of this change as the logical extension of the view that hardware has been transformed from a scarce, expensive resource into a cheap, easily purchased commodity - the logical outcome of which is the need to treat provisioning it like a mass good, not a precious luxury.

Perhaps less obvious is the implications of this vision - that existing processes and organisational structures need to change to support this new mode of automated management.

Today, IT organisations interpose a large set of processes and requirements in the provisioning process. Budget requests, discussions with the various operations groups like network and storage, scheduling meetings, all surrounded with lots of paperwork. And these mechanisms make sense for an environment in which they help ration scare resources. They are in place to ensure that each precious resource is devoted to its highest possible use.