Billing. The cloud computing revolution

> 1. A user will always have all resources s/he needs
> 2. A user will pay only for what it uses
> 3. The applications are delivered as an easy to use service
> 4. The users do not want to know what is going inside the cloud

The corollary of the above is that Data Center, outsourced or not, is transforming - for its owners - from a cost center, into a profit center, once it becomes a cloud.

This is major shift that started with Amazon Web Services sending an INVOICE. This is a natural consequence of having resources available outside the organization - like electricity,virtual nodes, storage and so on - is that the IT Director receives an invoice, and s/ he does not know who should pay for it.

Why? Because the IT department, does not invoice traditionally the employees and the company affiliated users. The major resource management software tools today simply don't have a billing module. The only possibility is the IT department pays for this invoice from AWS and adds it up to budget they should request next year.

What will happen short term is we will add internal billing modules inside the corporate ITs , able to interface to external billing systems (like AWS) and -as an option - assign charges to the internal project that generated the need for this external resources.

The idea of billing internal users is not as heretical as it sounds. The users will not pay in cash the invoice. But the IT will know for sure who consumes what and will be able to report back how much it cost the to offer services to the users.

If one event will declare victory in the cloud computing revolution, is the introduction of an internal billing in every IT department, which, from that moment onwards will operate a cloud, not a data center.

This is a huge qualitative jump: the cloud ecosystem will evolve with private, hybrid, public clouds using many wholesale resource providers (like AWS) to offer lower and lower cost services with increasing quality of service through competition and benefit ultimately the users of the clouds worldwide.

This is not a vision, but a real, achievable state. Here are some idea for business start-up

- Internal Billing System Modules
- Professional services to restructure organizations budgets for IT billing
- Remote billing services for internal IT
- Resource Optimization in a cloud eco-system
- job scheduling using pricing as one more criteria
- Porting applications to clouds
- become billing aware
- create AMI (Amazon Machine Images) and AMI-like for others
- ... more