William Forrest

Hey, props to McKinsey's PR machine, which created a blogsplosion of activity on the release of a study titled, "Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing".  The frenzy began as William Forrest, the lead analyst/author of the study, was reported to be planning to "present a report aimed at debunking cloud computing's appeal for large businesses" (Forbes.com, "Deflating the Cloud" 4.15.09).

"Planning" is the word that hit me here.  The report was headlines before it was released.  And when it was released, mainstream press (New York Times, Forbes, Washington Post et al) and bloggers alike covered the story as if it were big news.  Very big.  Leading with such phrases as ,"trying to adopt the cloud model would be a money-losing mistake for most large corporations", the coverage acted as if McKinsey had pronounced cloud computing dead-on-arrival.

McKinsey did no such thing.  Far from it.

The report itself is very conservative, if a little preachy, and is actually pretty common fare for a symposium presentation - which it was.  McKinsey's William Forrest, of the great press coverage, was scheduled to present this report at a symposium sponsored by the Uptime Institute.  Who are they I wondered?  Well, Uptime Institute is a research and advisory group whose mission is to improve data center efficiency, and whose tagline is, "The Global Data Center Authority".

Well, well, well .... It seems we have a pretty big coincidence here:

• An organization that excels at making money from advising IT how to improve their data center operations makes a presentation that is reported at a symposium sponsored by a group that is dedicated to data center success (formerly known as "Computer Site Engineering, Inc".)
• The study is reported in the press and blogs as if McKinsey had put up a sign saying "Cloud computing: Abandon all hope ye who enter here." and sounded the clarion call, "Back to the Datacenter."
• All of the potentially inflammatory things that McKinsey is reported to have concluded were found - not in the bland little report - but in the words of Mr Forrest speaking to the press.

I promise you that if you were to download the 34 slide presentation itself, you would find very little interesting and absolutely nothing that is news-worthy.  If I had to make a synopsis (using direct quotes where practical) it would roughly go as follows:

• "Using "clouds" for computing tasks promises a revolution in IT similar to the birth of the web and e-commerce."
• "While it has great potential, many of the claims being made about cloud computing have lead some to the point of "irrational exuberance" and unrealistic expectations."
• "The purpose of this report is to focus the nascent cloud industry and its consumers on setting realistic expectations by taking a "hype free" approach starting with the most basic question of what a "cloud" actually is."
• There is much confusion in the market between cloud and cloud services - a common definition would be useful and McKinsey would be a good arbiter of its definition
• "'Cloud computing' is approaching the top of the Gartner Hype-cycle" (and apparently just beginning the curve of the McKinsey hype cycle.)
• Throw in a little FUD, "The 2000 dot-com bubble provides an extreme example of the dangers of investing in hype." And reminding us all that, "From peak to trough, the NASDAQ-composite lost ~ 80% of it's [sic] value"
• The cloud is good for small and medium businesses
• "Most EC2 options are more costly than TCO for a typical data center." I never thought I'd say this, but 'poor Amazon' takes the fall as the overpriced cloud predator luring unsuspecting CIOs into its web/cloud. Probably because it is best known and most public with its charges.
• IT professionals would be best served by rigorously applying virtualization techniques to their data centers. (I believe McKinsey folks can help here.)

Really nothing earth shaking here.  The controversy stems from the company's assertion that large enterprises would lose money in a wholesale shift of their data centers to the cloud.

A.)   Of course they would

B.)    What large enterprise on earth is contemplating doing that?

C.)    What cloud provider is suggesting that they do so?

D.)   Who would disagree?

E.)    Where's the news value?

Shame on McKinsey for picking on poor Amazon -- and bravo McKinsey PR.