I assume that most of you have heard the theory of the butterfly effect related to chaos theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect), not the film. In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions; where a small change at one place in a nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state. The effect derives its name from the theoretical example of a hurricane’s formation being contingent on whether or not a distant butterfly had flapped its wings several weeks before.
The public cloud (the perfect storm)
Salesforce.com is one of the few survivors of the first internet wave where one of the major ideas targetted towards the B to B market was to facilitate the ERP court for enterprises where independent providers would run ERP blocs such as CRM for the client where the data would reside outside the firewall in the providers application. This solution is excellent for enterprises that do not wish to invest in an application that would provide a similar service internally.
Google has over the years enhanced their portfolio of application that run on their servers where individuals can use an email function (Gmail) to drive trafic to their search engine. This function was later made available to enterprises.
As Amazon (and Google) have become highly effective over time to negotiate storage space they at one point decided to leverage this ability to procure and run storage space less expensively available to individuals and entreprises. The principle is to provide storage space outside the firewall on which the enterprise can run applications (in an architecture as a budle of services).
The public cloud can be used to either leverage cost or to rapidly develop new application architectures that can then continue to run on a public cloud or be brought in house to a server or a bundle of servers (private cloud) see Get your cloud strategy right! ( http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/29211 ) .
The needs of the business should drive the IT Service Strategy (the perfect cloud)
Where the needs of the business and the business strategy should drive the IT Strategy, the IT Department can leverage the business strategy with an effective IT Service Strategy that would spell out how the roadmap for how the IT Department will cost effectively run the IT Function but also how to support the business function. In a recent interview Vic Bhagat, Chief Information Officer Global Growth & Operations of General Electric clearly spells out the need for the IT Department to deliver flawless services but also to help the business build effective process industrialisation ( http://www.metisstrategy.com/forum-on-world-class-it/#jump ) where the IT Department should help the business functions to simplify processes that can then be industrialised (automatised) when needed and on the cloud (external or internal) for speed / cost effectiveness when applicable.
