Larry Ellison is right

This is what Larry Ellison was quoted as saying about cloud computing in September 2008. Everyone was amused, but the impact of his words is not a coincidence. He resonated what we all knew deep in our hearts.

The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

This is what I wrote on Cloud Computing Google discussion group on January 25, 2009

From all the lively debates on this group, this is the one definition that makes sense. Almost everything we have today in IT, is a proto- cloud, and can be transformed into a cloud if we meet the end users expectations. As Nati Shalom pointed out, a person attracted to the cloud after reading all the buzz, has two key expectations:

1. The ability to get a quality service any time (how the provider will get in minutes the resources to provide this quality is not his/her business)

2. The ability to pay only for what s/he uses when s/he needs it.

The rest is an implementation details. Users want to be totally free away from any technical complexity other than the service itself.

Every current grid, data center, individual lab network, can become a cloud if it meets the above two simple requirements.

This reminds me of quote from Moliere

Monsieur Jourdain: And this, the way I speak. What name would be applied to...?
Philosophy Master: The way you speak?
Monsieur Jourdain: Yes.
Philosophy Master: Prose
Monsieur Jourdain: It’s prose. Well, what do you know about that! … These forty years now, I’ve been speaking in prose without knowing it.

(Molière, The Bourgeois Gentleman)

We did try to make clouds all our lives, and we didn't know about it. We are now getting there.

Oracle has a rich offering of on demand cloud delivered as SaaS. Very few people quoted Larry's final words:

We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing.

Larry promised in 2005 to make Oracle a $30B company We all know this figure will be exceeded soon.