Cloud insanity – the Shills come out of the woodwork

oWhen people read my posts and comments on other great blogs regarding my opinions about rating and certifying cloud hosts, SAAS, PAAS, they sometimes think that I am 100% against cloud based soltuions. This is patently incorrect, as I routinely recommend hosted SAAS for project management, small business, budget constrained start ups, etc. What I do not recommend is that mid market businesses that have CLOB (capital line of business) applications, hosted on their own racks, or managed by a conventional, stable vendor, change to a cloud solution until the PAAS and SAAS providers get industry rating and certifications. The SNA shops knew this, and went through the in house/ hosted rating travail. The result? An industry in which any business owner can get insurance for business continuity disruption that is caused by IT systems failures. If you are a mid sized business with an internal server rack, distributed multisite architecture, or a hosted AS400 or new IBM architecture, you can insure your operations. You can insure any Redhat, Microsoft, BEA, Websphere, whatever installation, managed and rated SAS70, or hosted in your unairconditooned broom closet, but it will cost a little more. A nice underwriter will come to your place or your managed host’s place, and write a policy.

Can’t do this with the current cloud offerings. Doesn’t mean that cloud computing ain’t here to stay, but some folks take issue with me saying anything regarding the unrated and uninsured nature of the especially thinly capitalized PAAS solutions. Oy! But now, a shout out to a hero I have never met, Jane Mcarty,  – yeah! yeah! You go girl!

Jane actually puts her hands on web hosted apps, asks and applies proof of feature performance criteria in much the same way that any good CIO or upper level staffer would do with a licensed server application. Jane uncovers such simple and basic things that one says, “the PAAS vendor didn’t know that?, huh?”. Good on you, Jane.

It was on Jane’s stellar bog that I spotted a comment thread a few days old, where a shill for the cloud industry says, in so many words, that the time to question the cloud hosted apps is over, they are established and able to deliver, and that self styled analysts, like me, have NO BID-NESS asking what if the service goes down, whaaaaaa! Self hosted solutions go down. And then commenter Russell says one of the most amazingly naive things I have ever seen in print, maybe in my entire life”: See the actual thread here.

Commenter Russell on Jane Mcarty’s blog thread”

“Many of the PaaS providers are in business with deep pockets (Force and Quickbase), well funded by professional investors (Bungee Labs), running with established management teams (Quickbase), or conservatively managed with established customer bases (WorkXpress).”

Ok, where do I begin to refuse this insanity? How about the TechCrunch.com deadpool? No? Lets start with a quote from Tref Laplante,, a principal at Workxpress.com, who says:

WorkXpress is committed to its customers and the quality of its product.  To this end it is a privately held, revenue generating company that to date has not received venture capital funding, and therefore is not under pressure to behave in ways that run counter to its mission of customers and product.” (emphasis mine).

You can see my context on this piece of Mr. LaPlante’s unassailable logic here. But, I digress. And I wish nothing but good for workxpress.com.

On the one hand, we have Russell the unknown commenter saying that VC funded PAAS platforms are an assurance and a bulwark against the vicissitudes of having a mission critical platform beyond one’s ultimate control; Partnership disputes, forced sales by the limited partners,   and raids of the venture’s bank account by coked out CEO? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Ok, got it. VC funded PAAS, though unaudited and closed to inspection, and with unknown capital reserves, is safe because is overseen by, (wait for it now) professional investors. Gawd.

On the other hand, we have a principal of a popular, (and in my opinion one of the better) PAAS shops saying that because they are NOT VC funded, they are more trustworthy, due to the fact that they are, so to speak, master baiters of their own hosted hooks and fly rods

In either case we have no idea how much runway the venture has as far as operating capital is concerned. In the case of the giants (Amazon, Intuit, Google, Gogrid, Rackspace ), when they go down, it doesn’t matter because then it is bad and you will merely get an apology and a small refund.

If your business lines are damaged, taking crucial cash flow out of your pocket, and goads the potential for civil liability (in cases of service critical business), then you are truly screwed doubly, as there are no lines of underwriting that will insure a PAAS solution for anything but the actual costs of the outage.

You people are wearing me out.

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A Fairy Tale of Mountain View

It was a silent 4:00PM in Mountain View, CA, the artificial city of the Silicon Peninsula. I ended my funding pitch with a quote from Jonathan Swift. I had no idea it would be so poorly received:
“When a true genius enters the world, you may know him by this sign: the Dunces are all aligned in confederacy against him.”

So I quoted with a smile at the VC meeting where my baby, ThruDispatch, was pitched.

One of the Senior Partners hurled a stentorian barb in my direction.”You are calling yourself a genius and we are the Dunces? ”

“Not at all. I am merely saying that many valley equity investors seem to be throwing capital at just so many duplicate social media and video sharing plans”, I said, almost ready to mace these suits if it wasn’t for the consequences. Don’t they see the mess in cloned business models ruining this wonderful valley?

One of the Juniors looked at me with withering scorn and vomited his invective in my general direction, “Everyone in this room makes seven figures, we are placing the next sub-round in Facebook Apps…good day Mr. Wilensky and, good luck with your….plan”.

As I left, I passed a famous ‘Silicon Valley undertaker’, a reaper of VC capital, walking confidently into the conference room. He had a track record of raising capital and burning down (so to speak) any number of here and gone startups, few of which ever became profitable. Indeed, he seemed more notorious for NOT making equity pay. What was his secret?

“How do you do it?”. I hissed, “how, how?” He barely glanced backwards at me as his Patek Philipe Minute Repeating watch chimed a quarter past the hour.

“I hire friends, I am hired by friends, I make sure that the first order of business when receiving a placement of equity is to find a way to compensate the VC partners”, he said, his suit was impeccable.

Hmm, leather sandals with a suit in such Bay Area cold.

Clammy and faint, I staggered towards the elevator – Ping….Bing…bong..softer as the conference room door clicked closed….fainter voices from behind…”hey guys…good to see you again….(Ping!)

It was 4:30PM in Mountainview.