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• New From Gartner: CloudSmackdown

  June 17th, 2009 : Rich Miller

  Is cloudy marketing getting out of hand? I could easily get a rant going on this. But hey, things always sound authoritative coming from Gartner, so I’ll just point over to Lydia Leong at CloudPundit:

  “If you’re a hosting vendor, get this into your head now: Just because your cloud compute service is differentiated from Amazon’s doesn’t mean that you’re differentiated from any other hoster’s cloud offering,” she writes. “Yes, these offerings are indeed targeted at the enterprise. Yes, there are in fact plenty of non-startups who are ready and willing and eager to adopt cloud infrastructure. Yes, there are features that they want (or need) that they can’t get on some of the existing cloud offerings, especially those of the early entrants. But that does not make them unique.”

  Lydia notes the “worrisome similarities in emerging services” and itemizes some traits shared by these new offerings. Her post suggests a looming problem for the enterprise cloud: if analysts are frustrated by marketing hype and have trouble differentiating between many new offerings, will customers fare any better?

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