Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Benchmarking the Leaders

Beyond looking at long lists of factors, one way to determine the right approach might be to benchmark the industry leaders. The easiest way to do this might be to consider the top four “Cloud Computing Leaders of 2011,” named by TechTarget’s SearchCloudComputing.com.19

At the number one position is Adrian Cockcroft, the cloud architect at Netflix. Under his direction, Netflix migrated out of its data centers and into the public cloud for most if not all of its IT.20

David Nelson, at number two, chief cloud strategist at Boeing, directed efforts that leveraged the cloud for special projects, such as a secure supply chain and logistics portal built in a matter of weeks, and a near-virtual-reality interactive experience to let customers visualize the 737, by stitching together tens of thousands of images.21

Number three, Allan Leinwand, is chief technology officer of infrastructure engineering at Zynga, the social gaming powerhouse. He set Zynga on a course that leverages the cloud initially when game uptake is uncertain, then moves processing in house once demand stabilizes.22 Now that Zynga has a strong base of demand, Leinwand has moved even more processing off of the public cloud and into the company’s private zCloud, reserving the public cloud for additional elasticity.23

Number four, Christian Reilly, formerly manager of global systems engineering at Bechtel, pursued a fully private cloud strategy—using cloud technologies on dedicated, owned infrastructure. ...