Bonus - I've changed my mind on cloud!

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Hey, how's everyone? com. You know what? I'm all depauled out today. Today's CTO Daily Dose and a bonus CTO Advisor podcast. I'll publish this both as a podcast and as a daily dose. I teased this, I think the week of VMworld, which was that I'm changing my mind on this whole cloud thing. You might come to think, you know what, Keith, you're kind of a fool if you don't think cloud is a thing, so how are you changing your mind on it?

Have you not seen AWS re-invent? All the changes VMware has been making to make themselves into a cloud company, even Nutanix has the tagline, Nutanix, a enterprise cloud company. Everyone is gravitating to this term cloud and you're changing your mind on the topic? Well, a little bit of a play on words a little bit. You know what? Words mean things until they no longer mean what they meant. What exactly does that even mean? I've gotten into this conversation back and forth on Twitter, like the conversation on premise versus on premises.

If you have followed an enterprise technology or a cloud event for the past year, two years, three years on Twitter, you know the Twitter verse goes crazy anytime someone uses the term on premise versus on premises. The two different words mean two different things. That is until they no longer mean two different things. Language is a funny thing. I get into this conversation, so I started this whole conversation off with like on premises versus on premise. The term like was not meant to compare two things.

S. we have this brand of Winston cigarettes and there's this famous slogan, Winston's taste good like a cigarette should. English teachers snapped. They hated the term like a cigarette should. It is as a cigarette should. There was an incorrect use of the term or the word like. Now we've completely changed. The ad agency that came up with the slogan knew that the term like was not appropriate for, it was not an appropriate use the way they were using it in Jingle, yet they changed it and eventually language morphed to change it.

Why am I having this conversation about cloud? Well, I'm an engineer by heart. I spent a few years at Lockheed Martin. They spent a couple of years drilling into me how to define requirements, how words mean something as we're defining requirements. So when a customer came with the requirements or the high level business request to build a cloud, that meant something to me. The term cloud was something that we had defined via the NIST definition of what a cloud is.

A cloud would have these five attributes and be these, be delivered in these three different types of methods. Well, then we had cloud washing where a bunch of vendors came in and said, well VMware, vSphere enterprise is now a cloud. Windows Server 2012 is a cloud OS. Linux is cloud. AWS is cloud. Traditional colo is cloud. Cloud became this term that really didn't mean anything. Well, I was at VMworld 2017. I hosted it for theCube a couple of weeks ago.

And now it seems to be just a normal exception that if you have a VMware vSphere software defined data center, you have a true private cloud or you have a cloud. And I found myself swallowing the frog in my throat and thinking, you know what? Why am I continually fighting this term cloud? Does that go to talk to clients? Does that go to talk to CTOs, CIOs, senior architects? They consistently use the term in a way that I don't define it.

So just as, you know, as on-premises, on-premise versus on-premises grates the teeth of a lot of the grammar folks out there on Twitter. The term cloud, when used in that context, grated my teeth. However, what enlightened me is when we were talking about digital transformation last week. I did the CTO advisor daily dose on what is digital transformation. It is a buzzword, but that buzzword means something to a lot of people. When we're conversing with each other and we're trying to solve these complex business challenges, a conversation or a term like the digital transformation means something.

It's a shortcut. We kind of know what you were talking about and we can get in the same direction. I'm coming to the realization when someone says that they have a VMware based cloud, you know what? It is what it is. Can't get held up on the terms they're using cloud incorrectly. When they're saying that we're building a software defined data center in AWS and they're confusing the terms and they're taking the concept of having a VMware cloud, which was kind of an oxymoron to me in the past, and they're putting that in AWS, I have to swallow it and say, you know what?

I generally understand what they're saying. I can't be held up personally on the term cloud as to define what it is that they're looking to do. They're looking to transform in a manner and the manner that they've chosen has been traditional IT in a different take. Hurts my sensibilities as an engineer a little bit, but as a CTO advisor, someone who's looking to solve business challenges using technology, I can't get held up on the term cloud just as I preached that people can't get held up on the term on premise versus on premises.

There's marketing folks out there using the term on premise, knowing that the word doesn't mean what they're using it to mean, that eventually that word will take hold and will say on premise and on premises interchangeably because language changes. Language changes and it changes even in enterprise IT, the term cloud. I'm getting to the point that, you know what? I was wrong about cloud. No, the concept of using abstracted data centers and using abstraction to move along the business of IT, that is coming, that has come.

It will continue to evolve and will continue to go there, but I can no longer be stuck up in this concept of the five different attributes of the NIST definition of cloud delivered in three different methodologies. That is no longer the case. Cloud is a encompassing term that I myself need to abide by, stop fighting the rush, use it in the context in which my customers and conversation is referring it to and move on. That's it for this CTO daily dose, a little bit of crow from the CTO advisor, but tomorrow I'll get right back on my pedestal and talk a little VMware cloud on AWS and what that means for the overall ecosystem of VMware cloud partners as well as individual CTOs.

That's it. Talk to you guys tomorrow's CTO daily dose. com, on Twitter at CTO advisor, and of course, subscribe to the blog, the podcast, I'm sorry, and you can subscribe to my Twitter channel or content in general by clicking below.