In a recent research note, Gartner argued that the revenue claims of cloud vendors are increasingly hard to digest. Gartner said enterprises shouldn’t take vendor cloud revenue claims at face value and evaluate them based on strategy and services (naturally using tools from the research firm).
A week ago, I argued that Google should provide some kind of cloud run rate just so customers can get a feel for scale and how it compares to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure and IBM. Oh well. Unlike Gartner, I think the revenue figures matter somewhat, but are far from the deciding factor.
But debating revenue run rates and nuances between the private and public cloud variations misses the point. What’s missing from the cloud equation today is better transparency.
With that issue in mind, here’s where I think we need to go in terms of cloud transparency:
PUBLIC FACING
Revenue reporting from cloud vendors. Amazon Web Services breaks out its results and they’re straightforward earnings and revenue. IBM has an “as-a-service” run rate. Microsoft has a commercial cloud run rate. And Oracle to its credit has line-by-line breakdowns of the various flavors–infrastructure-, platform- and software—of as-a-service sales.
More of the ZDNet post from Larry Dignan
Tags: cloud transparency
