| Getting into the cloud, and getting into the cloud on the same level as Amazon, Microsoft, or Google are two different things. Just like getting into the airline business, and getting into the airline business to compete with the likes of American Airlines, Lufthansa or United Airlines are two different things. The same overly simplistic business plan could just as easily be applied to 'getting into Cloud', and while leasing a few business jets off Boeing has it's own page on boeing.com[1], it's still a significant expenditure. Here's the same plan: 1. Lease a pile of servers from Dell or HP 2. Developers, Sysadmins, and other staff are highly skilled but otherwise fungible. OpenStack is rapidly maturing so you can take advantage of that. 3. Marketing, marketing, marketing. Through newer online social media channels instead and compete on price. Airlines are famous for making only meager profits, especially considering the capex required to play. Since Cloud is still a relatively immature industry, there's still room for niches, just like the airline industry has regional airlines. All GPU cluster anybody? Bare-metal Private Servers? Digital Ocean and Rackspace are chugging along just fine. How about selling of Cloud services that run on top of AWS? Is that still Cloud? Dropbox famously started off just running on top of Amazon's S3, and I'd definitely call them Cloud. How about if you setup Heroku for Erlang? Scala? No billion dollars of Capex required, and I'd still definitely call Heroku a Cloud business. Trying to compete with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, or Google without billions of dollars is tilting against windmills, but to say 'getting into cloud' requires several billion dollars at the outset is a bit of an overstatement. [1] http://www.boeing.com/company/about-bca/startupboeing.page |
You already lost the game. The entire point of cloud computing is you don't need any of the features that Dell and HP heap onto their servers. Every port, every button, every LED costs you another couple hundred mW.