A top Fortune 500 CIO says he is lukewarm about the cloud claiming that it is overhyped.
Tom Peck, chief information officer of Los Angeles-based Aecom said that Partners clinging to upfront payment models and a lack of understanding of the difference between true cloud and “as-a-service” has left him thinking the cloud is just a facade to appease Wall Street.
Speaking during the XChange Solution Provider 2016 keynote Peck said that his biggest beef with the cloud is that he sees too many product companies attempting to sell cloud like it’s on-premise hardware and demanding upfront payments.
Aecom would prefer to see cloud delivered as a subscription service with a true pay-as-you-go option, but Peck said such a model has remained elusive.
“This doesn’t make us happy, because all I’m doing is paying you a markup for something branded ‘cloud,’ when, in reality, it’s on-premise. It’s just in somebody else’s premise,” Peck said.
Part of the challenge is on the buyer side, with many end users failing to understand the difference between true cloud and Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service or Software-as-a-Service offerings, he said.
While Aecom sees a benefit in being able to spin up compute cycles on demand and having someone else manage its infrastructure, Peck said the elasticity of cloud is often overstated.
“The cloud is only as elastic as you’re willing to pay, because you still need to predict hardware and compute cycles and all that stuff,” Peck said.
