Once upon a time in Florida, there was Terremark, an IaaS provider heavily invested in both IaaS and VMware infrastructure. It was tooling along, looking good like many platform providers in the embryonic stage of Cloud-on-the-Hoof (CotH).
The wild and wooly days had Rackspace, Saavis, AWS, and another half-dozen Managed Services Providers, ISPs-looking-for-more, and startups a-plenty. Azure was only a Microsoft dream. Salesforce was just hitting third gear. ServiceNow was trying to Unicorn. Facebook hadn’t even gone public. Obama was in his first term.
Verizon paid a premium for Terremark. When announced, Verizon offered $19 and Terremark was trading just above $14. Where Verizon could have made an enormous infrastructure steal, it’s now mostly toast. But they’re not the only visible mistake. Look to HP’s Helion and others in the ditch to answer the great question: what happened?
Here’s the one word answer: marketing.
The old axiom, if you make it, they will come, is spoken only by hucksters.
Let’s take some other time-honored axioms to prove the point.
“The smoker you get, the player you drink”*
Yeah, smoke that strange tobacco, and you can be convinced of anything. If you want the answer to the question of why Openstack remains strong while Eucalyptus has drowned, it comes down to reality. As difficult as Openstack is (and certainly not for civilians), it works. Yes, it has some wild and wooly problems, and is like riding nine horses at once. Here’s the upside: a lot of horsepower. Here’s the downside: a lot of oats.
The better mousetrap of computing is a myth. Amazon went low-dough, low-margin, and attracted millions. It hums along, creating itself as an asset every day. It’s approachable on the low-end, while a wickedly-convenient resource on the commercial end. Anyone can use it. No 18 holes with dinner is needed, so its cost of sales is frighteningly low.
New school marketing is: get your name out where your audience watches.
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SOURCE: Network World
Tom Henderson
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