Don't get lost in the stack - keeping an eye on the ball, despite the cloudiness

Maybe we need to call it the collaboration net or some other fancy word instead of the cloud, but I think more often than not we're starting to miss some of the interesting and tractable use cases for cloud-enabled IT. From my view, this is largely because we're distracted with the potential enormous complexity surrounding orchestration layers and the virtualized data center. While there is significant innovation going on in that space, it is often just that - pure innovation if not speculation, and not necessarily real products or real world solutioning. Meanwhile, the end user staring at out of control, often unuseable data along with today's economy needs some new solutions for their day to day business.

Unfortunately, within the cloudy cloud, the real solutioning in my opinion is happening at the fringes, rather than at the core, because the core is often circling around what to do with a pretty complex stack made up of infrastructure, applications, orchestration, and more. But at the core, there are some interesting products that are changing the way IT is being done. One example that crossed my radar today is Zoho, and Zoho in my opinion is giving us storage solutioneers a bit to think about.

Now I don't have any particular connection with Zoho and I haven't even used their product myself, but Zoho is a web-based office suite, similar to Google Apps. Zoho recently came out with a SharePoint connector. Users of Zoho can now put their Zoho office data into SharePoint in the form of office files, and still open and use their data with Zoho applications. The interesting part of this story is how it all rotates around unstructured data, and managing and leveraging unstructured data in a collaborative manner across the web.

I have long thought that SharePoint is going to be the killer cloud application - with the virus-like spread of SharePoint across businesses, all it takes is a good tiered storage and collaboration connector for Microsoft to rule the cloud. Why? SharePoint is an easy to understand enhancer of unstructured data, and it is also rapidly becoming a master gateway into all the data a business thinks is important. I think there is plenty of room for other vendors to add to this ecosystem, and potentially steal the limelight before slow-moving Microsoft spoils the party. Zoho's stepping up, and hinting at how they think it should be done.

The point is, I think the Zoho stuff is 1.0 of what will be a tremendously useful and accessible cloud solution. Talk about enabling the Netbook, Zoho and SharePoint would be one way to do it. While the stuff on the back-end will be what it takes to power the cloud, this space is about delivering solutions that make business 2.0 more capable, and for the storage industry, those solutions more often than not will revolve around making unstructured data more collaborative. With SharePoint in mind, can you leverage your approach to unstructured data to make SharePoint more collaborative? Or could your unstructured data storage solution replace the capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint while providing more capabilities via the cloud? Footnote, Tarmin thinks they can, and there are a bunch of pretty cool components at play in their approach to unstructured data, the cloud, and collaboration.

Don't get me wrong, I like the speculation, conceptualization, and pioneering innovation around the cloud just as much as anybody else - it's a bit like conceptual lincoln logs for big boys and girls. But if I were doing it myself today, I wouldn't be investing my energy there. I'd be looking at how to get these real world, marketable solutions on the street. From my view, there seem to be hundreds or thousands of those solutions, but they are more often than not a marked change from the complex, big solutions that traditional vendors like to bring to market. It will be interesting to see how this change in the marketplace impacts the IT industry over the next decade.