Cloud Computing Support: Success Starts at Home

CIO — An article last week in Network World displayed all of the glorious promise, challenge, and contradictions of cloud computing in less than 1000 words. The article focused on the quality of support for Amazon Web Services (AMZN)' user forums, based on a study by a team of researchers from IBM (IBM) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The primary finding of the study is that technical support questions posted to the AWS forums take a long time to get answered, with administrators (I assume these are AWS employees who provide feedback and suggestions to questions posted in the forums) taking up to 20 hours to respond to queries. The article implies, but does not say outright, that Amazon is falling short of providing the kind of support that should be part of a cloud computing offering. It offers a couple of interesting anecdotes about customer support expectations that illustrate crucial aspects of cloud computing which must be understood by cloud computing adopters to achieve success.

To address the first issue squarely: does Amazon's forum support fall short of user expectations?

If one looks at the actual adoption numbers, it seems clear that there is strong market adoption of AWS. As I wrote last year, an analysis conducted by Guy Rosen (@guyro) and RightScale showed that around 50K EC2 instances were being started in the US each day. The numbers are bound to be higher today. So it seems that somebody must find the AWS offerings more than acceptable.

By the same token, it is also clear that the foundation of AWS support is more akin to open source than traditional "enterprise" compute offerings. But is that a shortcoming?

Many of the adopters of AWS are people or organizations that have found the established mode of computing (aka, the traditional "enterprise" mode) unsatisfactory. Developers, of course, have flocked to AWS. Likewise, many business units of companies, both large and small, are finding their way to AWS as a way of bypassing the expensive and unresponsive enterprise IT groups. That characterization may be inflammatory, of course. A different way to saying it is that the established processes and cost structures do not align with the agile and inexpensive ways AWS adopters seek to meet their specific business challenges.

Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma, characterized this mismatch of offering and needs as "overserving the customer," which is to say, the established offering (in the case of enterprise IT, deliberate, risk-averse, process-heavy approaches) is designed for an offering way beyond what developers and business units needs. In his theory, users turn to new offerings that fall short of meeting everything the current market leaders offer, but help those users solve their business problems without all the overhead of the current market leader offerings. In this way, the new product serves a new market, one that is overserved by the established products.

Christensen goes on to say that the "inadequate" new offerings gradually improve to the point where they are sufficiently robust to meet the market requirements of the existing customers, which causes a tipping point in the overall market, in which the new offerings displace the existing ones and drive the old ones out of the market.

He gives examples from many different markets, including disk drives, earth excavation equipment, and department stores. In examining department stores, he identified the fact that a new breed of discount stores eventually drove mainstream department stores that could not develop a new approach to the market out of business. For example, discounters came to dominate electronic appliance distribution (think TVs, audio equipment, etc.), displacing the full service (and expensive) mainstream department stores.

Left unaddressed in Christensen's theory is how customers accustomed to knowledgeable sales staff employed by the mainstream department stores coped with discount stores that assumed the buyer would have sufficient knowledge to make a selection on his or her own.

And I think that is at the heart of the matter with respect to cloud support — how will IT organizations that operate with assumptions about vendor support availability respond to the new world of cloud computing? But to my mind, it goes well beyond just having someone at the end of a phone line ready to take a call.

The most fascinating part of the NetworkWorld article was an anecdote proffered by Lydia Leong, an analyst from Gartner (IT). She noted that she had just interacted with a large enterprise in which some developers had created a new application and thought it was fantastic that Amazon was going to support it, freeing IT from having to do so. Except, as she noted, Amazon doesn't provide end-to-end application support. Amazon take responsibility for the compute infrastructure, but leaves the application support to the user. To quote the article:

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