Not so long ago I wrote a post extolling the simplicity and capability of Amazon’s Cloud offerings. But the real key is simple pricing.
No surprises there: RedMonk has been pushing IBM to offer simple On Demand pricing since, well, since IBM was spending tens of millions of dollars to market the notion of On Demand service delivery, but failing to deliver on the concept over the time frame.
Well, with Amazon Web Services all that is changing. My favourite quote from IBM Impact show in Las Vegas this week came from Amazon’s resident enterprise expect, Jamie Kinney. Clearly Jamie knows enterprisey – he has worked at Oracle, after all.. twice. So what did he say?
“IBM has been very innovative on pricing.”
Excuse me for falling about laughing. Except…
The truth is IBM couldn’t hope to offer Cloud test and development, let alone production workloads, without working out its pricing strategies. That’s right folks – for all the talk of production workloads IBM has not made it easier for third parties to get involved until quite recently.
DB2 development per cent per hour. Blammo!
WebSphere per cent per hour! Kabbam!
Rational per cent per hour. Biff!
IBM is fixing the one thing it really needed to get its head around to do well in the cloud- simple pricing models, without needing to call a third party expert to unravel them. Forget technology – the cloud is about simple pricing and billing.
Why do ISVs want to run on salesforce.com? Billing.
What did Azure early adopters say they wanted from Microsoft. Billing.
Why is the Apple AppStore kicking ass? Simple pricing and billing.
So now Amazon says IBM is being innovative, I think we can safely say things are going to get a lot more interesting from here on in. Its not about the technology, people.
IBM is a client.
monkchips says:
May 8, 2009 at 3:23 pm
oh fuck- what if the cloud is.. nothing to do with technology? what will the pundits do? http://bit.ly/ECaSe [blogpimping]
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
kdierc says:
May 8, 2009 at 3:33 pm
If only telcos would follow with simple pricing model RT @monkchips: http://bit.ly/ECaSe
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ITraor says:
May 8, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Telco + Simple? That’d be the day. RT @kdierc If only telcos would follow with simple pricing model RT @monkchips: http://bit.ly/ECaSe
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raesmaa says:
May 8, 2009 at 4:24 pm
IBM has been very innovative on pricing http://tinyurl.com/qcutq5
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
raesmaa says:
May 8, 2009 at 4:30 pm
IBM has been very innovative on pricing http://tinyurl.com/qcutq5 #SAAS
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
afilimonov says:
May 8, 2009 at 5:54 pm
“IBM has been very innovative on pricing” priceless… http://bit.ly/qhRLT #feedly
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Ian Gilyeat says:
May 8, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Your comments about billing aply to every subscription based offering. Whether it be telephone service, magazine subscriptions, cable TV or software-as-a-service. Simple billing fits subscriptions and SaaS providers have to get it right if they want to compete.
James Governor says:
May 11, 2009 at 9:28 am
indeed they do, Ian. which is one reason i find it surprising this aspect isn’t better understood. you can have the greatest architecture in the world, but without straightforward billing and metering its going to be hard to make the cloud stick.
Chewie33 says:
May 11, 2009 at 10:07 am
IBM in the Amazon Cloud: on pricing and billing innovation http://bit.ly/m3CN9 simple. enough said.
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Ric says:
May 11, 2009 at 11:18 am
It’s a shame that IBM didn’t come to this point a bit earlier, but better late than never – @hortovanyi is looking at IBM again …
Did you notice that Jive has released an Amazon-based offering of Clearspace/SBS? …
http://www.jivesoftware.com/jivespace/community/jivetalks/blog/2009/05/04/enterprise-cloud-computing-announcing-jive-express
James Governor says:
May 14, 2009 at 4:54 pm
yup. and yup 😉 more seriously Ric we all worked hard to get IBM to open up for Toast – and it didn’t work out. painful for us all…
What the cloud is all about « Yet Another VC Blog says:
May 11, 2009 at 6:11 pm
[…] via James Governor’s Monkchips » IBM in the Amazon Cloud: on pricing and billing innovation. […]
vb net says:
May 20, 2009 at 11:55 am
IBM finally gets it!