No shock here...

Computerworld recently reported on two Goldman Sachs CIO surveys. The contents of their finding and the somewhat tepid response on Slashdot wasn't too surprising.

The gist was most Enterprise CIOs are not planning on investing in Cloud Computing; rather laying off staff instead. That said - they are interested in virtualization (to some degree as a mechanism for laying people off).

This pretty much is the shaping of the market we have planned for at CohesiveFT. Technology adoption for the most part is a cultural phenomena - old dogs as a rule don't learn new tricks. You have to wait for the young dogs to become slightly older dogs. I have seen studies that put "cultural generations" (generational beliefs and attitudes accelerated by shared mass media) turnover at about 8 years. This makes sense to me as we look at the post-baby boomer world.

So...VMware is an "overnight success" after 10 long hard years - and virtualization is still maybe only deployed in 20% of the Enterprises of these same CIOs. Our bet for the virtualization "harvest" is that in comes in 2010; we will be coming out of trough of disillusionment of virtualization and clouds, SaaS inroads will be even deeper, we expect virtualization and clouds to bring a couple of the Linux vendors even more to the fore in the enterprise, hardware refresh cycles will have kicked in thus dealing with today's virtualization latency issues, and Windows Server Core 2008 will be moving out in earnest.

So no surprise that "clouds" aren't on the radar of the average CIO. Good thing about averages is that there are people and organizations who are "above average" which is why vendors like CohesiveFT are out there successfully pitching to the early adopters. These organizations are able to look at virtualization and cloud computing and see the gains to be had now - and the realization that as the market matures and their facility with these technologies expands; there are even greater gains to be had.

As I said at Structure 08 when I was on a panel on PaaS (platform as a servcie) - we are looking at the early adopter part of the curve not as "Enterprise" vs. "SMB", rather as customers of SaaS (want to buy an outcome) and customers of PaaS (want to effect an outcome), and are planning our products, partners and marketing accordingly.