I am impressed and have new hope for the world today.
First,
this was the most participation I have had yet in a survey.
Admittedly, I ran it longer than many of them, but the responses were
an order of magnitude higher.
Secondly, the results were
amazing. A whopping 90% plus of you said the Cloud's time has come.
If
this survey had been run three weeks prior to when it was, I would not
have been that moved, but the survey was run during a period when
Rackspace experienced two major outages in it's Dallas data center. I
would have thought that might have shaken some of the confidence in the
Cloud as a resource for real business. I know for us at DataSolutions
we had some questionable moments, so did our customers.
But
in the end the Cloud persevered, and so did Pervasive DataCloud. It
just so happened right before the second outage we moved the DataCloud
to an elastic architecture on Amazon. This not only gave us better
scaling ability, it allowed us to miss the problems at Rackspace all
together. Now I am not saying that Amazon is any more reliable than
Rackspace in a single point of failure infrastructure, but the ability
to configure availability zones ourselves open ups some real options
for some one like our team without an army of engineers running
around. In short our customers were still moving data between Salesforce, QuickBooks, NetSuite, Ryma and all our other end points as well as running Monte Carlo Simulations to predict their sales as the Pervasive DataCloud expanded and contracted.
In the next few weeks I will start spending some time
on describing what we have created. In that time I will run surveys
centered around Cloud based computing. Once we get through some in
depth coverage on the Pervasive (elastic) DataCloud I'll return to some
more basic business issues.
In keeping with the Cloud theme, this week's survey question; I
know a lot of you are trusting applications to the Cloud, but I wonder
how many of you are trusting your data to the Cloud. In a percentage
range, how much of your company's data exists in the Cloud?
0 to 10%
10% to 35%
35% to 65%
65% or greater