Dow Jones CIO on Cloud Rights - Challenging The Cloud Business Model

( Page 2 of 3 )

Del Vecchio acknowledges that an enterprise-friendly approach to cloud computing will affect the business model for many vendors. "The model currently offered has a lot of economies of scale for the vendors. If they have to tailor and customize they lose economies of scale, and then what is difference between the cloud and a dedicated hosted provider environment?"

Dow Jones is already a Salesforce.com customer and also offloads 50% of its b2c Web traffic to Akamai. "We started looking at where else we can take advantage of cloud services, and started getting concerned about lack of SLAs and commitment in terms of where our data would reside," says Del Vecchio. "We are a global organization and we started getting a little uncomfortable about not even knowing where our data is."

In fact, Del Vecchio says Dow Jones has already implemented an internal cloud that the company is looking to leverage across the enterprise for its parent News Corporation. "We see it as an opportunity to get a common set of resources," he says. There are several business drivers behind this strategy:

• Reducing all the human resources associated with supporting different platforms across various divisions
• Reducing CapEx across the company
• Minimizing time to deployment for business applications
• Decreasing time-to-market for consumer-facing initiatives
• Supporting green practices

>>> More Expert Voices Articles          >>> More By Susan Nunziata