---
title: "If You Can't Cloud It You Can't Measure It"
date: 2011-05-11T16:57:07Z
modified: 2011-05-11T16:57:07Z
permalink: "https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/if-you-cant-cloud-it-you-cant-measure-it/"
type: post
status: publish
excerpt: ""
wpid: 3325
categories:
  - cloud
tags:
  - cloud
  - maritz
  - VMware
timestamp: 2011-05-11T16:57:07Z
---

[![sloes](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3451/3819739763_3ca192141c.jpg)

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/s2ublack/3819739763/ "sloes by Aim low, play bass, on Flickr")

Its hardly the most original insight that cloud apps provide a lot of data about how users use the app – this data can then be used to improve the application. Tim O’Reilly tagged this thinking in Web 2.0 terms years ago. We have seen SaaS providers take advantage accordingly. Useage data? That’s some valuable metadata right there.

But I was still struck by something VMware CEO Paul Maritz said the other day at a London briefing event. You see- VMWare had a problem. It didn’t actually know how or what people were using its free ESX download for.

> We had no idea what for, so we created a free hosted ESX SaaS service to try and gain better insight into what they are doing. Now 400 people a day look at it, and we’re getting our first upsell opportunities.

This really is a new way of doing business. It underpins our new [RedMonk Analytics](http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2010/10/27/redmonks-first-product-developer-intelligence/) platform. You need to get your software hosted to better understand how people want to use it. That’s a key cloud benefit. In a SaaS environment when a customer calls something a “requirement” you’re in a much better position to push back – oh, you mean extending that function that nobody actually uses?

Cloud offers all kinds of new opportunities for tech firms. But also of course enterprise IT. As Maritz puts it:

> “Managers are going to get a new kind of light they can shine into the hedgerows of IT”.

If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it (Maritz actually worked under Andy Grove, one of the claimed originators of that maxim). Well Cloud allows for measurement in a way that on prem just doesn’t.