Adam Stern, founder and CEO of cloud hosting pioneer Infinitely Virtual, says he takes no satisfaction in accurately predicting that the defining trend for 2017 would be weaponization of the Internet of Things. After WannaCry and NotPetya slammed unsuspecting, unprotected organizations with epic ransomware attacks this year, Stern acknowledges that prescience is not always its own reward.
Looking ahead to 2018, Stern is back with what the IT establishment might regard as a contrarian forecast. In his sights is the industry’s infatuation with XaaS.
“Accenture is all in,” Stern says, quoting the company: “There’s a new era of service delivery and you don’t want to be left behind. Now’s the time to transition to as-a-Service’… to innovate faster, drive revenue and reduce costs.”
That lovefest has extended to IT pundits as well, he laments. “TechTarget put it this way: ‘What is XaaS (anything as a service)? XaaS is a collective term said to stand for a number of things including ‘X as a service, ‘anything as a service’ or ‘everything as a service.’ The acronym refers to an increasing number of services that are delivered over the Internet rather than provided locally or on-site. XaaS is the essence of cloud computing.”
Except that, according to Stern, it isn’t.
“Call me a curmudgeon but I’m considerably less smitten with XaaS, which, as an organizing model for IT and cloud computing, doesn’t merely suffer from diminishing returns,” he says. “It epitomizes no returns. A year from now, XaaS will be on fumes.”
Stern suggests that “TaaS” – “Technology as a Service” – may represent the current nadir among what he terms “four-letter handcuffs.”
“It isn’t a matter of being snarky to diss this pointless acronym stew,” Stern says. “These initials hamstring the creativity of the people who are devising needed services. As an industry, we’re trying to solve business problems, and that should be far more important than figuring out which bucket anyone fits into. 2018 will be the year when we realize that it’s ridiculous to silo off these industries and sub-industries – and when we finally stop feeding a new cottage industry comprised of initials that classify everything. Meanwhile, actual solutions are becoming so varied and so interconnected that no snappy, four-letter template will be capable of describing, differentiating and housing actual deliverables.”
According to Stern, the push to reduce and simplify is being driven by a combination of marketing gurus who are unfamiliar with the technology and industry analysts who believe everything can be plotted on a two-dimensional graph: “Service providers are trying to deliver products that don’t necessarily fit the mold, so it’s ultimately pointless to squeeze technologies into two or three dimensions. These emerging solutions are just much more nuanced than that.
“We make an assumption that one infrastructure service company is the same as another, and that because they’re IaaS, they all must do the exact same thing, their feature sets are interchangeable, and the underlying architecture is immaterial,” Stern says. “The message is, it doesn’t matter what equipment they’re using — it doesn’t matter what choice you make. But in fact it does. Never mind the analysts; cloud computing is not a commodity business. And never mind the Street; investors and Certain Others fervently want it to be a commodity, but because those Certain Others go by the name of Microsoft and Amazon, fuzzing the story won’t fly. They want to grab business on price and make scads of money on volume (which they are). They win with one-size-fits all (read: XaaS).”
For Stern, the year ahead offers real opportunity, if vendors finally level with users. “The devil really is in the details,” he says. “There are literally hundreds of decisions to make when architecting a solution, and those choices mean that every solution is not a commodity. The sooner we finish off the alphabet soup, the sooner we can get to the meat of the matter. Digital transformation, if it’s to happen in 2018, won’t emerge from some marketing contrivance, but from technologies that make cloud computing more secure, more accessible and more cost-effective.”
To speak with Adam Stern, please email: admin@edgecommunicationsinc.com.
About Infinitely Virtual
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Infinitely Virtual is a leading provider of high quality and affordable Cloud Server technology, capable of delivering services to any type of business, via terminal servers, SharePoint servers and SQL servers – all based on Cloud Servers. Ranked #28th on the Talkin’ Cloud 100 roster of premier hosting providers, Infinitely Virtual has earned the highest rating of ”Enterprise-Ready
