Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

by Joe Weinman
Released September 2012
Publisher(s): Wiley
ISBN: 9781118229965

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Book description

The ultimate guide to assessing and exploiting the customer value and revenue potential of the Cloud

A new business model is sweeping the world—the Cloud. And, as with any new technology, there is a great deal of fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding cloud computing. Cloudonomics radically upends the conventional wisdom, clearly explains the underlying principles and illustrates through understandable examples how Cloud computing can create compelling value—whether you are a customer, a provider, a strategist, or an investor. Cloudonomics covers everything you need to consider for the delivery of business solutions, opportunities, and customer satisfaction through the Cloud, so you can understand it—and put it to work for your business. Cloudonomics also delivers insight into when to avoid the cloud, and why.

  • Quantifies how customers, users, and cloud providers can collaborate to create win-wins

  • Reveals how to use the Laws of Cloudonomics to define strategy and guide implementation

  • Explains the probable evolution of cloud businesses and ecosystems

  • Demolishes the conventional wisdom on cloud usage, IT spend, community clouds, and the enterprise-provider cloud balance

Whether you're ready for it or not, Cloud computing is here to stay. Cloudonomics provides deep insights into the business value of the Cloud for executives, practitioners, and strategists in virtually any industry—not just technology executives but also those in the marketing, operations, economics, venture capital, and financial fields.

Note: The ebook version does not provide access to the companion files.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Preface
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Chapter 1: A Cloudy Forecast
    1. Clouds Everywhere
    2. Cashing In on the Cloud
    3. Beyond Business
    4. Clarifying the Cloud
    5. Farther On
    6. Summary
    7. Notes
  9. Chapter 2: Does the Cloud Matter?
    1. Productivity Paradox
    2. Competitiveness Confrontation
    3. Summary
    4. Notes
  10. Chapter 3: Cloud Strategy
    1. Insanity or Inevitability?
    2. Democratization of IT
    3. Industrialization of IT
    4. Strategy
    5. The Cloud: More than IT
    6. The Networked Organization
    7. Form Follows Function, IT Follows Form
    8. Aligning Cloud with Strategy
    9. Everyware, Anywhere
    10. Summary
    11. Notes
  11. Chapter 4: Challenging Convention
    1. What is the Cloud?
    2. Economies of Scale
    3. Competitive Advantage and Customer Value
    4. Cloud Ecosystem Dynamics
    5. IT Spend
    6. Issues with the Cloud
    7. Summary
    8. Notes
  12. Chapter 5: What is a Cloud?
    1. Defining the Cloud
    2. On-Demand Resources
    3. Utility Pricing
    4. Common Infrastructure
    5. Location Independence
    6. Online Accessibility
    7. Difference from Traditional Purchase and Ownership
    8. Cloud Criteria and Implications
    9. Is the Cloud New or a New Buzzword?
    10. Summary
    11. Notes
  13. Chapter 6: Strategy and Value
    1. Access to Competencies
    2. Availability
    3. Capacity
    4. Comparative Advantage and Core versus Context
    5. Unit Cost
    6. Delivered Cost
    7. Total Solution Cost
    8. Opportunity Cost and Cost Avoidance
    9. Agility
    10. Time Compression
    11. Margin Expansion
    12. Customer and User Experience and Loyalty
    13. Employee Satisfaction
    14. Revenue Growth
    15. Community and Sustainability
    16. Risk Reduction
    17. Competitive Vitality and Survival
    18. Summary
    19. Notes
  14. Chapter 7: When—and When Not—to Use the Cloud
    1. Use Cases for the Cloud
    2. Inappropriate Cloud Use Cases
    3. Summary
    4. Notes
  15. Chapter 8: Demand Dilemma
    1. A Diversity of Demands
    2. Examples of Variability
    3. Chase Demand or Shape it?
    4. Summary
    5. Notes
  16. Chapter 9: Capacity Conundrum
    1. Service Quality Impacts
    2. Fixed Capacity versus Variable Demand
    3. Splitting the Difference
    4. Better Safe than Sorry
    5. Capacity Inertia
    6. Summary
    7. Notes
  17. Chapter 10: Significance of Scale
    1. Is the Cloud Like Electricity?
    2. Distributed Power Generation
    3. Is the Cloud Like Rental Cars?
    4. Capital Expenditures versus Operating Expenses
    5. Benchmark Data
    6. Cost Factors
    7. Benchmarking the Leaders
    8. Size Matters
    9. Summary
    10. Notes
  18. Chapter 11: More is Less
    1. Is the Cloud Less Expensive?
    2. Characterizing Relative Costs and Workload Variability
    3. When Clouds Cost Less or the Same
    4. If Clouds are More Expensive
    5. Beauty of Hybrids
    6. Cost of the Network
    7. Summary
    8. Notes
  19. Chapter 12: Hybrids
    1. Users, Enterprise, and Cloud
    2. Hybrid Architecture Implementations
    3. Summary
    4. Notes
  20. Chapter 13: Fallibility of Forecasting
    1. Even Stranger than Strange
    2. Demand for Products and Services
    3. System Dynamics
    4. Whips and Chains
    5. Exogenous Uncertainty
    6. Behavioral Cloudonomics of Forecasting
    7. Summary
    8. Notes
  21. Chapter 14: Money Value of Time
    1. Demand and Resource Functions
    2. Cost of Excess Capacity
    3. Cost of Insufficient Capacity
    4. Asymmetric Penalty Functions, Perfect Capacity, and On Demand
    5. Flat Demand
    6. Uniformly Distributed Demand
    7. Better Never than Late
    8. MAD about Being Normal
    9. Triangular Distributions
    10. Linear Growth
    11. Exponential Growth
    12. Random Walks
    13. Variable Penalty Functions
    14. Summary
    15. Notes
  22. Chapter 15: Peak Performance
    1. Relationships between Demands
    2. Lessons from Rolling Dice
    3. Coefficient of Variation and Other Statistics
    4. Statistical Effects in Independent Demand Aggregation
    5. Significance of
    6. Issues with Perfectly Correlated Demand
    7. Community Clouds
    8. Simultaneous Peaks
    9. Peak of the Sum is Never Greater than the Sum of the Peaks
    10. Utilization Improvements
    11. Summary
    12. Notes
  23. Chapter 16: Million-Dollar Microsecond
    1. On Time
    2. Rapidity Drives Revenue
    3. Built for Speed
    4. Summary
    5. Notes
  24. Chapter 17: Parallel Universe
    1. Limits to Speedup
    2. Amdahl versus Google
    3. Free Time
    4. Summary
    5. Notes
  25. Chapter 18: Shortcuts to Success
    1. Rapid Transit
    2. Sending Letters
    3. Short on Time
    4. Bandwidth Isn’t Enough
    5. Summary
    6. Notes
  26. Chapter 19: Location, Location, Location
    1. Latency and Distance
    2. Circle Covering and Circle Packing
    3. Inverse Square Root Law
    4. Spherical Caps and the Tammes Problem
    5. Summary
    6. Notes
  27. Chapter 20: Dispersion Dilemma
    1. Strategies for Response Time Reduction
    2. Consolidation versus Dispersion
    3. Trade-offs between Consolidation and Dispersion
    4. Benefits of Consolidation
    5. Benefits of Dispersion
    6. The Network is the Computer
    7. Summary
    8. Notes
  28. Chapter 21: Platform and Software Services
    1. Infrastructure as a Service Benefit
    2. Paying on Actuals versus Forecasts
    3. Installation
    4. Investment
    5. Updates
    6. Service-Level Agreements
    7. Continuously Earned Trust
    8. Visibility and Transparency
    9. Big Data and Computing Power
    10. Ubiquitous Access
    11. Response Time and Availability
    12. Multitenancy, Shared Data
    13. Cloud-Centric Applications
    14. Scalability
    15. Communities and Markets
    16. Lock-in
    17. Security and Compliance
    18. PaaS: Assembly versus Fabrication
    19. Innovation and Democratization
    20. Deconstructing the Pure SaaS Model
    21. Summary
    22. Notes
  29. Chapter 22: Availability
    1. Uptime versus Downtime
    2. Availability and Probability
    3. Availability of Networked Resources
    4. Availability via Redundancy and Diversity
    5. On-Demand, Pay-per-Use Redundancy
    6. Summary
    7. Notes
  30. Chapter 23: Lazy, Hazy, Crazy
    1. Behavioral Economics
    2. Loss and Risk Aversion
    3. Flat-Rate Bias
    4. Framing and Context
    5. Need for Control and Autonomy
    6. Fear of Change
    7. Herding and Conformity
    8. Endowment Effect
    9. Need for Status
    10. Paralysis by Analysis of Choice
    11. Hyperbolic Discounts and Instant Gratification
    12. Zero-Price Effect
    13. Summary
    14. Notes
  31. Chapter 24: Cloud Patterns
    1. Communications Patterns
    2. Hierarchies
    3. Markets
    4. Repository
    5. Perimeters and Checkpoints
    6. Summary
    7. Notes
  32. Chapter 25: What’s Next for Cloud?
    1. Pricing
    2. Ecosystems, Intermediaries, and the Intercloud
    3. Products versus Services
    4. Consolidation and Concentration
    5. City in the Clouds
    6. Spending More while Paying Less
    7. Enabling Vendor Strategies
    8. Standards, APIs, Certification, and Rating Agencies
    9. Commoditization or Innovation?
    10. Notes
  33. About the Author
  34. About the Web Site
  35. Index

Product information

  • Title: Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website
  • Author(s): Joe Weinman
  • Release date: September 2012
  • Publisher(s): Wiley
  • ISBN: 9781118229965