68% of the Fortune 100 are Clueless | Hacker News Reader

68% of the Fortune 100 are Clueless

cloudability.com

71 pointsstormental27 comments

My first thought was "is there any actual content in among the buzzwords". My second thought was "what's he trying to sell". Apparently, cloudability is a service that allows you to track your "cloud" spending, which seems totally useless to me. I mean, why should I track SaaS and Amazon S3 backups in the same category, but leave off $1000 Yourkit license in some other category?

One Tool to Rule them All would be nice, but at the moment we're focusing on a fairly specific niche to address real problems we've personally encountered at companies. We're not the only ones who've had these sorts of problems either:

http://gigaom.com/cloud/cloud-computing-fiascos-lessons-from...

The key thing here is really to address two things that seem to come up a lot:

1) Cost items that can vary considerably and where a mistake -- code bug, forgetfulness, sloppiness, whatever -- can leave you with serious sticker shock. (At one company we were at, an engineer spun up a couple hundred EC2 instances for a map/reduce job and forgot about them, racking up an extra $100,000 that month.)

2) Cost items that don't vary much but which have such a low friction to signing up that you wind up with bunches of accounts across an organization without realizing it.

Finance departments already tend to have the software purchase cycle fairly well managed, but SaaS/PaaS/IaaS doesn't fit nicely into those procedures. Because of that, we're building our tools to play nice with others, so whether your finance group is managing things in Excel or you have a fancy SAP based system we're working to make it easier to get this data where it needs to be.

I agree... the post just has a sensationalized title. He was just missing his company's pitch at the end.

> We need better tools that let companies understand and budget for the cloud money they are already spending while at the same time letting end users sign up for the services they need to do their jobs.

This kind of tool would be aimed at precisely the market that would never pay for it.

If employees need to circumvent company policy to use Basecamp, the only way in which such a tool would be used is to identify culprits and get them back in line.

edit: on the other hand I would love a startup to prove me wrong :)

I'd counter that if Company X learns that they're employees are using Basecamp at $99/mo to actually get things done rather than a much more expensive tool that team members don't want to use, the company has gained a valuable insight into how they can save a lot of money (and make their team's life easier). Call me a dreamer but I believe everyone wins on the cloud.

I worked at a company that had invested big $$$ into an agile tool without consulting the teams if it was adequate for their needs. For a month or 2, the teams used the tool as required. Eventually, when the boss turned his back, each team quietly found a tool. Because they were being quiet, each team found a different tool from every other team. They were actually tracking their progress in both systems, but the expensive one was only being updated afterwards. Everyone would sit around the easy-to-use tool and plan things, and then 1 unlucky soul had to transcribe it into the crappy tool. This actually sped things up because the crappy tool would waste time x5, where the combination of tools only wasted time x1. (And we usually got a non-developer to do the transcribing, too.)

Eventually, the whole thing came to light and the company was forced to admit how stupid they were being.

See, they had paid for a year's service of the bad tool, and they were adamant that they get their money's worth. They were absolutely blind to how much money they were wasting daily. The sunk cost was sunk. There was no way to recover from that, and the tool just couldn't be salvaged.

Look on the bright side. At least they admitted it.

Curious: after the year of service was up, did the company decide to go with one of the other tools you guys found, or did they keep dropping stupid money?

After about 5 or 6 months of that nonsense, they discovered the deception (because we let them in on it... that was a nervous moment, and I got to break the news. lucky me!) and they finally relented and stopped pestering us about the tool they paid too much for. All the teams agreed fairly quickly that 1 particular tool was better, and we all standardized on it.

I think this is a common occurrence with government IT spending too. I worked as an electronics engineer for a short time as a contractor. They paid huge sums for some software archiving / source control / versioning program that can't actually handle merging (if I work on version 2 and check in my version becomes version 3. If you were also working on version 2 and check in version 3, you overwrite my changes, unless we worked on different files. It is as if the people who implemented it didn't really know what version control is supposed to do). So everyone ignores it and uses git or svn ti develop, and only copies to the expensive official program when coerced. When we tried to explain to management why we used svn instead, management flatly refused to believe merging source control a la svn could work in principle.

My history in IT has been that of circumventing corporate policy for fun and profit:

Scraping the company mainframe for billing data: Increased rev by $1 million fixing accounts incorrectly billed.

Compiling the scrapped data into MySQL: $3 million in lost inventory found.

Waiting 6 months for a site visit so I could tell the COO directly that any employee could dump all the credit cards in our database: Priceless.

It depends on who you're circumventing. If you're making an end-run around an obstinate IT department -- a situation we've seen a lot of -- then this is precisely the sort of tool that finance would want to help bring things back into the corporate-governance fold.

If you're circumventing finance, then we may not be a particularly helpful tool for you.

The surprising thing to me is the lack of concern over the security of cloud services. There are real risks in not having proper data segregation or even know in which country your data is stored in. Or what the security at the data center(s) is like.

Subverting the bureaucratic channel at a large corporation to "get on the cloud" must drive the CPO and CSO nuts. There is a time and place for bureaucracy.

More accurately, there is a time and place for controls and discipline. You can have both without actual bureaucracy, or, more commonly, bureaucracy with neither of desirable ends.

You might think they are clueless but there is a method to IT's madness. I would not recommend publicly trashing anybody in corporate buying chain if you ever plan to go upscale and sell your services for 7 figures at CIO's level. Nobody appreciates being publicly called a fool.

CIO's job is to manage massive resources and organizations - first and foremost to keep the critical line-of-business systems running. For most of them cloud right now is neither the top priority nor a viable substitute for core infrastructure. You are right on with your strategy to get foot in the door to circumvent their slow-moving processes. However you should be thinking of how to work yourself into their higher-level planning process instead of positioning yourself as adversary of their corporate policy by calling it stupid.

Just remember, the CIOs have the power to ban technologies that sneak out through the back door. Alienate them at your own peril!

EDIT: Whoever down voted this, please post an actual substantive rebuttal.

>Just remember, the CIOs have the power to ban technologies that sneak out through the back door. Alienate them at your own peril!

I agree about the general idea of not throwing stones into the sky. They have a tendency to fall back down on one's nose.

However banning tools that were 'snuck in through the back door' because of their efficiency and because nobody had the heart to follow the actual procedure to get them through the front door strikes me as profoundly childish. Especially if it is done as some sort of vengeance, or 'just because we can'. In fact about just as childish as throwing stones into the sky.

I'm being a bit idealistic here. There will always be turf wars in BigCos. But hey if some people switched from trying to look like the best and brightest to getting stuff done instead, i'd be all for it.

My point was not whether "banning tools that were 'snuck in through the back door'" is childish or fair or unfair. That's not even relevant. The point was that they have the power to do this and they do not hesitate to use it. Occasionally they even have valid reasons related to security and business continuity. Remember how all those defense / intelligence secrets walked out of the door on a USB stick and ended up on Wikileaks?

There is no place for idealism in selling to BigCos. You have to work through the process and build your case or someone else will steal your deal, possibly with an inferior product.

Our post on how "rogue" cloud services are making their way into the Fortune 100/500/50 ... a response to 37Signals blog.

What makes Basecamp "cloud"? There's a material difference between software delivered as a service and ephemeral IT infrastructure (cloud computing).

I think of cloud using @davenielsen's OSSM description: services that are On-Demand, Self-Service, Scalable, Measureable. https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/d8...

You're just talking about hosted software, then. That's been around since the 90s...

Using Cloud to mean abstracted server infrastructure is much more useful. Otherwise it's just a meaningless catch-all marketing term.

So, how do you pitch the CIO on something the company is already using?

Salesperson: This software is so easy and ... CIO: Won't it be a big learning curve Saleperson: Well, actually, your company is already using our software

Exactly.

What you pitch them is on buying larger license for the whole enterprise, increasing the usage and integrating deeper into their systems.

Getting from a handful of users to thousands is easier to do when you have both initial end user champions and the support of IT.

So does "the cloud" mean "web applications or services" now?

I can't improve on this:

http://everythingsysadmin.com/2011/06/avoid-using-the-term-c...

That's precisely how we look at it internally -- IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. We speak in terms of "the cloud", as coarse and imprecise a term as it is, because that's what a lot of the people we're trying to reach are thinking in terms of and looking for. Plus, it just flows more smoothly than "IaaS/PaaS/SaaS" in a headline. :)

I like the terms *aaS, but I don't they don't exactly roll of the tongue (either four syllables or a too generic term that sounds silly and is easily confused with other things).

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