There are 2 S's in SaaS

Yesterday I went to the San Diego Cloud Computing Conference and a couple of things really jumped out at me:

1. Outside of Silicon Valley, things aren't so "Cloudy"
2. There is a lot of money to be made in "as a Service" model so long as you are in the service business.

With regard to the first, having lived in Silicon Valley for years, it was always a wake up call when I would come home to Southern California. In the years since I moved back permanently, I appreciate my regular trips back to Northern California where they actually speak my language. The fact of the matter is that, outside of the Bay Area and a few forward thinking places on the East Coast, technology isn't the center of the universe, and by and large, people are nowhere near as tech savvy. Southern California definitely illustrates this fact. It was clear that, by the nature of the questions being asked by people in the IT community from the region, that there is not a clear and concise understanding of the Cloud let alone the different aspects of its adoption, in particular, the differences between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. There is still a lot of evangelism to be done.

In this fact lies the opportunity for those of us who provide solutions consulting. The messages that is clear to me is that the technology companies still don't do much to help the situation as demonstrated by the key notes; several of them were given at the conference and they were all essentially pitches for specific technology products. I have said for years that SFDC claims to be the "No Software" company, but they continue to conduct themselves just like the "Baby Oracle" that they are. The only difference between the SFDC and Oracle is their distribution platform, and maybe rightly so, as it seems to have worked.

But I think that this is changing. What is interesting to me at this juncture is the shift from technology being the high value piece of the equation. This is effecting the way the ultimate client views the Cloud vendors. In an age where all of the components of an enterprise class system can be either downloaded or accesses for free, technology is no longer scarce, and therefore, no longer commands high value. Interestingly, both the closing discussion of the SFDC and Microsoft keynotes eluded to this point. Peter Coffee from Salesforce was very specific when he said that the game is now going to be run by the trusted advisers, Accenture, Deloitte, etc. Woody Pewitt from Microsoft expounded on the idea when he addressed audience concerns that technical skill sets were becoming less prevalent, he said "$300/hr for a business analyst is a lot better than $90 for a cable-puller."

All of this leads up to the key point...it is the "S" that signifies service in the acronym that is the more important in the new age of the Cloud. As such, the technology vendors MUST rethink themselves in terms of Service Provider, and more importantly, the actual service providers, the systems integrators, VAR's and professional services firms need to rethink themselves as well. Technology in the age of the Cloud is quickly becoming a commodity, and the expertise to evangelize it, leverage it and gain from it is becoming the critical factor to success.