Cloudonomics

Acknowledgments

A book like this owes so much to so many that it is impossible to fully trace the directed causal graph. First and foremost, however, I’d like to thank the wonderful team at John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Sheck Cho, executive editor at Wiley, immediately saw the potential of this book and has been extremely professional, flexible, insightful, transparent, collaborative, and patient. I’d also like to thank the rest of the terrific Wiley team, especially Natasha Andrews-Noel, Stacey Rivera, and Helen Cho, who helped make this book a reality. Thanks to Bennett Ruiz of AT&T, Barrie Sosinsky, and Hunter Muller of HMG Strategy for helping make the connection with Wiley. And thanks to Zick Rubin and Brenda Ulrich at the Law Office of Zick Rubin, who were both knowledgeable and responsive.

I believe that a book such as this is immeasurably enriched by data. Beyond the extensive references, thanks are particularly due Greg Orelind of Alexa, who kindly permitted the use of the Alexa pageview data illustrating demand variability; Marty Kagan and Greg Unrein of Cedexis for HTTP response time data; Ali Kafel and Dave Connolly of Sonus Networks; Stephan Beckert and Olivia Vandenbussche of TeleGeography; and James Miller of the FCC.

The usual disclaimers apply; I take full responsibility for any errors, which, sadly, have a nonzero probability of existing in a book of this scope.

Any delineation of the main causal path of events leading to my involvement in the cloud would have to include Eric Shepcaro, Allan Leinwand, Om Malik, and Alistair Croll. I worked for Eric beginning at the turn of the millennium when he was AT&T’s senior vice president of application networking. We were pioneers in introducing new hosting services—called utility computing at the time—and, thanks to Eric, I was an active participant in Don Tapscott’s IT & Competitive Advantage program—the syndicated research effort that led to Wikinomics and included in-depth collaboration with a host of thought leaders: Don himself, David Ticoll, Joe Pine, Anthony Williams, Rena Granofsky, Paul Strassmann, Erik Brynjolfsson, Charlie Fine, Mike Dover, and others.

Eric also introduced me to Chris Albinson and Allan Leinwand of Panorama Capital, who invited me to join their Technology Advisory Board. Allan also introduced me to Om Malik. My first official cloud event was Om’s Structure, in June 2008, where I was on a panel moderated by Alistair, who asked a number of thought-provoking questions, which in turn led to my first blog posts for GigaOM.com, including “The 10 Laws of Cloudonomics.” This book is a 100,000-word-plus expansion of the “Laws” post and a number of others I’ve done for GigaOM.com.

Om is the epicenter of the cloud, between his own social and professional network, the focus GigaOM.com and GigaOM Pro put on it, and the Structure event, which I’ve had the pleasure of participating in as MC, moderator, and panelist since its inception. At Giga Omni Media, I’ve had the good fortune to work with Paul Walborsky, Stacey Higginbotham, Surj Patel, Derrick Harris, Carolyn Pritchard, Celeste LeCompte, Mike Sly, a host of cloud innovators and executives, and the magnificent Magnify Communications team: Stacey Tomlinson, Erin McMahon Lyman, and Jill Short Milne.

Extra-special thanks to Carl Brooks (now at The 451 Group) and Jo Maitland (now at GigaOM) of TechTarget, who were overly kind in naming me to their prestigious list of Cloud Computing Leaders.

I’d also like to thank UBM TechWeb, which owns and operates Interop, Cloud Connect, Light Reading, Heavy Reading, InformationWeek, and the former Business Communications Review (BCR, now moved online as No Jitter). Particular thanks go to Alistair Croll of Bitcurrent, Eric Krapf of No Jitter, and Blair Klein of AT&T. Alistair is always thinking several steps ahead of everyone else, and has been organizing both the Interop cloud summits as well as TechWeb’s Cloud Connect, where I’ve served as track chair of the cloud economics track and had the opportunity to learn from many cloud thought leaders and to work with the TechWeb events leadership and crew: Lenny Heymann, Steve Wylie, Manuela Farrell, Andy Saldana, Paige Finkelman, Amy Jones, and Emily Johnson. Blair is AT&T’s social media expert and also PR lead; it was she who originally asked me “Have you ever considered writing anything for external publication?” and suggested BCR; Eric Krapf was then editor in chief and published my first cloud article—“The Evolution of Networked Computing Utilities”—before cloud was cool. At Light Reading, special thanks to Ray Le Maistre and Carol Wilson, at InformationWeek, John Foley and Charlie Babcock.

At AT&T Labs, I was also fortunate to work with Ralph Wyndrum, Norm Shaer, Rick Kent, Rudy Alexander, Bernie McElroy, Stan Quintana, Steve Fisher, Sam Glazer, Clayton Lockhart, Tom Siracusa, Dave Belanger, Chuck Kalmanek, Ed Amoroso, Rick Schlichting, and dozens of other technical experts and executives and to interact with literally thousands of AT&T customer executives and their teams—in groups ranging from 1 to 1,000—thanks to executive/sales senior leaders Ron Spears, Donna Henderson, John Finnegan, Bennett Ruiz, Andrea Messineo, Norihiko Minato, Gopi Gopinath, Bernard Yee, and Andrew Edison; countless excellent country managers; regional sales vice presidents; sales teams; and PR, marketing, events, and legal leads Greg Brutus, Peter J. Butler, June Chan, Fenny Fang, Karen Ko, Mary Beth Asher, Dagmar Hettler-Gentil, Niall Hickey, Donna Cobb, Eileen Whelan, Andrea Montesano, Christine O’Leary, Linda Plesnick, Don Parente, Joanne Murphy, Wendy Weinstein, Janet Wyles, Sara Vincent, and Karen Wentworth. I enjoyed working with AT&T strategy, hosting, and cloud product management executives Bill Archer, Steve Sobolevitch, Steve Mucchetti, Steve Caniano, Chris Costello, Tim Connors, Amy Anderson, Toby Ford, and others. I was fortunate to work with the team at Fleishman Hillard, including Morri Berman, Patrick Yu, Gioconda Beekman, Winnie Leung, and Brad Mays.

At HP, I had the pleasure of working with great colleagues: Erwan Menard, Sandeep Johri, Dave Shirk, Rick Halton, Russ Daniels, Dave Collins, Sybille Schieg-Heimann, Reem El-Tonsy, Julia Ochinero, Andrea Nicole Garcia, Paul Battaglia, Blaithin Underhill, Rebecca Lawson, and Emil Sayegh, as well as my global team and business and technical colleagues. Special thanks to Jujhar Singh for his support in permitting me to work on the book in my spare time and to Jan Tarantino for her critical role. As at AT&T, at HP I also had the pleasure of working with a large group of excellent regional sales VPs, country managers, account teams, and cloud experts too numerous to name. And I also had the superb support of IVORY Europe: Andrea Lee, Kristina Dalborg, Robbie Crittall, and Harry Whitbread.

I’ve been involved in dozens of cloud initiatives, events, planning committees, and conferences that have helped introduce me to customers with unique problems and insights and cloud thought leaders and innovators. In addition to GigaOM Structure and Techweb/UBM events, I’ve been fortunate to participate in numerous events and initiatives. Some highlights: Debbie Landa and her team at Dealmaker Media/Under the Radar; George Gilder and Telecosm; Sharon Nakama, Gary Kim, Anamarcia Lacayo, and the rest of the team at the Pacific Telecommunications Council; Frank Gens at IDC and John Gallant at IDG Enterprise; Karen Tucker and the Churchill Club; Stuart Sharrock and Katz Kiely of ICIN and ITU; Tier 1/The 451 Group; CDM Media; TM Forum; IIR/Informa; Cloud Expo; Milken Global Institute; Mobile World Congress; BSS/OSS World; SIIA/All About the Cloud; GDS International; Argyle Executive Forum; Simon Torrance and STL Partners/Telco 2.0; Capacity Media; SWIFT/Sibos, and IEEE Technology Time Machine conference planners including Rico Malvar, Gerhard Fettweis, Maurizio Decina, and Roberto DeMarco.

I’ve also learned immensely from the academic/technical community: Special thanks to Ravi Rajagopal, a VP at CA Technologies but also an adjunct professor at NYU Polytechnic and the first to use my Cloudonomics papers in academia; Christopher Yoo, polymath professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania; Michael Lightner, past president of the IEEE and a professor at University of Colorado, Boulder, who gave selflessly of his time in ensuring the rigor and breadth of axiomatic cloud theory; Rico Malvar of Microsoft Research and the IEEE Technology Time Machine team including faculty of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; and Lucy Hood of the University of Southern California Marshall School.

The home of cloud computing, via both the invitation-only @Clouderati group and as an extended community is primarily on Twitter, where I am @joeweinman. Most of these individuals are also bloggers, executives, research analysts, CTOs, CIOs, and consultants. A special glue holds this group together, and I consider these leading cloud experts to be not only colleagues but friends and thought-leaders. Literally from A to Z, they are: Vanessa Alvarez, Dave Asprey, David Berlind, Linda Bernardi, Randy Bias, Benjamin Black, Simone Brunozzi, Rachel Chalmers, Sam Charrington, Jean-Luc Chatelain, Adrian Cockcroft, Peter Coffee, Reuven Cohen, Tim Crawford, Simon Crosby, Ellen Daley, William Fellows, Rodrigo Flores, Will Forrest, Mike Fratto, Jay Fry, Vijay Gill, Barton George, Bernard Golden, Charles Golvin, Christofer Hoff,...