CompTIA’s Cloud Community met last month at the association’s Annual Member Meeting, held at the Swissotel in Chicago, March 20 to 23. At the onset of the meeting, its Executive Council was asked an open-ended question; now that it’s mature, what effect has the cloud had?
Samantha Ciaccia, channel executive manager with Datto and the Cloud Community’s vice-chair, answered that she now “expects all her data [available] at any time on any device.”
Though we’ve been talking about it for years, cloud can still be a difficult thing to describe, but Cloud Community staff leader Chris Phillips described cloud short and simple: “It’s just somebody else’s computer somewhere.”
After this, Cloud Community Executive Council members Kirk Bohn, cloud services enablement leader with Arrow, and John Rice, senior director – partner community with Intermedia, presented the 2017 Cloud Roadmap; the latest version of a roadmap that CompTIA has made available “for several years.”
In talking about the roadmap, Kirk was quick to assert, “If you’re not in the cloud piece, you missed the bus.” Looking at forthcoming trends, Rice described Office 365 as, “A great wave coming across the bow of the ship.” He also cautioned that cloud firms “can’t operate with 50 to 100 customers anymore. It’s truly difficult to do.” Bohn added, “And if you don’t keep those customers happy you’re going to have churn. Churn is the worst enemy of cloud.”
Rice asserted, “My customers don’t care about cloud,” and shared a cautionary scenario he recites for his customers. “One of these days, one of your customers is going to do something in the cloud and you’re going to say, ‘Why didn’t you talk to me about that?’ and they’re going to say, ‘I didn’t know you did that.’”
