jrmcauliffe

You can't. Every business over a certain size will still need in house people that understand their problems. All Amazon, or any cloud providers for that matter, are doing is abstracting away IT services from the bottom up.

Need a server? click a button Message queue? click. Database? click. Virtualised Desktops? clicky-clicky. Virtual Tape Drive? (I'm as surprised as you are).

You're still going to need people who need to know what each one of those things means to your business. But in-house enterprise IT today still consists of lots of people (and payroll) who put things in racks, re-image desktops, restore SQL Backups, install custom software and give the tapes to the dude in the motorcycle helmet...

In the medium term the cloud won't replace IT. It will however redefine it to the point that the 'spare capacity' that you mentioned will be seen like an amusing anachronism.

Less than fifty seats with two resources?

Scale that up to five thousand seats. Five thousand seats is big? Not really.

Every day a piece of hardware dies. Every month someone rolls out a new software package. There are many different user profiles, accounting, sales, warehouse, IT, marketing, executive. Then there's that one guy that needs that program that only runs on XP SP1....

Every IT department has to justify its cost per user. Once you get above 1K seats, a lot of things that seem like overkill start to make sense really quickly.

All Amazon is offering is a managed version of what larger companies have been doing internally for years. Just like their server business, it seems expensive until you actually work out how much it would cost to do it yourself.

I don't even think this is really even targeting companies who are thinking about virtualisaton. I'd guess the early adopters will be the companies already using desktop virtualisation of some sort or another who already find it a management nightmare.

This sounds expensive compared to a stand-alone PC, but in terms of all the licensing and hardware required for in-house virtual desktops, it's reasonable.

The big difference is Amazon is now taking the 'risk' for sizing the infrastructure for virtual desktops. No need to estimate capacity for servers or licensing. Ten users next year, a thousand? You know it's going to cost you $x/user/month and no more sweating about server capacity, license compliance or negotiation.

Amazon 'Direct Connect' would also probably be a necessity for a good user experience, again limiting this to the pockets of people who'd already worked out thin clients were 'worth the trouble'.

Given the monthly cost of these is lower than the equivalent 'On-Demand' instance cost, it wouldn't surprise me if they had some sort of over-subscription 'special sauce' in the mix as well. Everybody doesn't flog their desktop 24/7...