Written by Tom Bishop, Conformity
Submitted by Conformity

Once upon a time I read a very good marketing paper that began with the statement: “People buy quarter-inch drill bits, but they want quarter-inch holes.  The biggest mistake most tech companies make in marketing their products is they talk about the features of their quarter-inch drill bits, not the quality of the quarter-inch holes that can be made, or how the features of that hole are relevant or important for how the hole is going to end up being used.”  Assuming you accept this, I make the following observations about how most companies in “the cloud management space” are making it harder for their markets to understand what they do rather than easier.

Specifically, the concern I have is that “managing the cloud” or “the cloud management market” or “managing cloud computing” is going to look markedly different depending on where you sit.  In particular, I think there are actually four cloud management markets or segments, with overlapping requirements to be sure, but still different enough that any company, vendor, or IT organization trying to “manage the cloud” should think about positioning itself in that context.  I also believe much of the confusion (or FUD) around “the cloud” and “cloud management” is because people use similar terms to mean very different things, each valid in its own right, but very, very different.

Read the rest at: SaaS Management: The Challenges of an On-Demand World