Preface

Like you, we live and work in the world of computing and computers, and we track trends and transformations as they occur. We’re old enough to have witnessed mainframes and their “virtualization of time” model. We lived through the transition from minicomputers to the radical new model of client-server computing. With the same awe you had of connecting to the entire world, we witnessed the amazing change brought on by the Web.

We bring that perspective to the current transformation called cloud computing. We’ve seen this movie before and know the danger of over-hyping something to death. (Literally to death—the term artificial intelligence had to be permanently put to rest after it made the cover of Time magazine.) We don’t think this is hype. We see something different going on this time that isn’t being exaggerated out of proportion.

We see an IT transformation that isn’t primarily technology based as the previous ones were. The same servers running the same operating systems supporting the same applications are running in corporate data centers as run in the cloud. Sure, developers have to learn a few new twists, but nothing more than they have to learn on a monthly basis anyway. Instead of technology being the basis of the change, this time it’s mostly about economics and business models. That’s very different, very interesting, and the reason we think this one is bigger than anything we’ve seen before.