Billing. The cloud computing revolution


> 1. A user will always have all resources s/he needs
> 2. A user will pay only for what it uses
> 3. The applications are delivered as an easy to use service
> 4. The users do not want to know what is going inside the cloud

The corollary of the above is that Data Center, outsourced or not, is transforming - for its owners - from a cost center, into a profit center, once it becomes a cloud.

This is major shift that started with Amazon Web Services sending an INVOICE. This is a natural consequence of having resources available outside the organization - like electricity,virtual nodes, storage and so on - is that the IT Director receives an invoice, and s/ he does not know who should pay for it.

Why? Because the IT department, does not invoice traditionally the employees and the company affiliated users. The major resource management software tools today simply don't have a billing module. The only possibility is the IT department pays for this invoice from AWS and adds it up to budget they should request next year.

What will happen short term is we will add internal billing modules inside the corporate ITs , able to interface to external billing systems (like AWS) and -as an option - assign charges to the internal project that generated the need for this external resources.

The idea of billing internal users is not as heretical as it sounds. The users will not pay in cash the invoice. But the IT will know for sure who consumes what and will be able to report back how much it cost the to offer services to the users.

If one event will declare victory in the cloud computing revolution, is the introduction of an internal billing in every IT department, which, from that moment onwards will operate a cloud, not a data center.

This is a huge qualitative jump: the cloud ecosystem will evolve with private, hybrid, public clouds using many wholesale resource providers (like AWS) to offer lower and lower cost services with increasing quality of service through competition and benefit ultimately the users of the clouds worldwide.

This is not a vision, but a real, achievable state. Here are some idea for business start-up

- Internal Billing System Modules
- Professional services to restructure organizations budgets for IT billing
- Remote billing services for internal IT
- Resource Optimization in a cloud eco-system
- job scheduling using pricing as one more criteria
- Porting applications to clouds
- become billing aware
- create AMI (Amazon Machine Images) and AMI-like for others
- ... more

Comments

Dave Levy said…
I think that even in a profit center, customers will pay for unused capacity, there will just be less of it than in a siloed, tied data center. I also think you're right in that a cloud must be outsourced, it needs the discipline of fear of losses to get its prices right, and to create the aggregated demand that allows the unused capacity to be large in terms of a job, but low in terms total demand. Moreover some companies are already using internal cross charging so again the move to where they need to be is relatively small. Nice Article. Dave.
Bhaskar Roy said…
Yes, internal usage tracking is required just like the phone usages. But here are other problems with cloud too - when IT buys software, they get a hardware spec from the software vendors. I dont think any software vendor is giving similar cloud spec, otherwise IT has to figure out themselves.

Anyway, I would like to explore that internal billing more as we provide billing solution on Salesforce Apex.

Thanks
broy@chikpea.com
Unknown said…
Well, thanks for the info shared here.Great informative article on Cloud Computing. By the way I have participated in the Cloudslam 09 conference. That was a great experience which I never had before.

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