I hear a common complaint from enterprise IT leaders: The public cloud providers are pushing predictive analytics, machine learning, IoT, and other shiny, new toys. But IT leaders simply want to get their workloads running properly in the cloud. The newer, innovative stuff is not that important right now.
Most enterprises have begun to move applications and data sets to the cloud. Many expect to find a platform analog from the public cloud provider or a platform configuration that’s similar to the platforms they run on-premises. The stress on enterprises these days means there is very little time for innovation. IT has been tasked with moving thousands of workloads to the cloud, but given little time to do it.
The cloud providers are doing what technology companies do: Selling future capabilities. But when public cloud providers focus on next-generation technologies instead, IT organizations are losing their patience and telling cloud providers, "Just get my stuff running in your cloud!"
Enterprises want cloud computing providers to provide the basics, provide those basics without outages or security issues, and meet their SLAs. The rest is fluff. The concern among IT leaders is that, if their provider is paying too much attention to the new, "innovative" stuff, they are not paying enough attention to the basics. No one wants to climb aboard a cart that’s ahead of the horse.
Cloud providers need to shift the focus from the future to the present. Those that do will attract enterprise customers who later will be be able to focus on new technologies -- and already be customers. Those that keep focusing on the future will find potential enterprises go elsewhere. The bottom line is that IT needs to solve today's needs today and will choose providers focused on doing that.