My experience with the cloud and why work will change and not disappear.

Until now I have multiple experiences with the cloud, for the most good.
i have worked on multiple cloud solutions in the past but let me describe them as 0.x versions.

For me the 1^st real serious cloud experience was a bit more than 1 year ago, when our company switched from an in house server to Microsoft BPOS as a complete replacement.

Since we are a small consultancy firm and don’t have that much else to do than consulting, our IT requirements are quite simple. We need Mail and Storage space for our documents.
With the in house server we had multiple outages during a year, mostly by lack of administering.
Being consultants in the field and hardly having time to maintain a server, BPOS was and still is for us the right solution. Since the migration we have less outages and a much more robust solution.
Have we run into issues with BPOS for our own environment? No not that I’m aware of.

Based on this experience I made a stance about deploy ability of BPOS and cloud solutions, they are suitable for MKB (Dutch for Medium and Small Businesses).
Most Small businesses don’t have the amount of work to hire a full time it admin. Hiring a service provider to maintain their own server might be even more costly than hiring an admin.
So seeing the capabilities of BPOS and the needs of most businesses I see it as a great solution that gives the business a complete Server replacement solution for a fixed price per user. resulting in a clear budget for IT spending, something most small businesses were looking for, for a long time.

So right now I’m deploying BPOS with a customer, and I run into some of the Cloud 1.0 issues.
In my opinion BPOS is a good working Cloud version 1.0 solution.
What do I mean with 1.0? Well 1.0 is mostly a tested solution (unlike 0.x versions) but still have quite some limitations caused by too few market experience.

in my opnion this is also the reason why we don’t see that much BPOS customers yet and why I think Office 365 will make a huge difference. What I have seen of 365 shows me it is a Cloud 2.0 version, meaning it has all needed features and is much more flexible to the customer.

This is also why I see changes happen in my work field, changes and not unemployment due to Cloud solutions.
Cloud 1.0 solutions gave me the idea that if every customer would adopt them I would be out of work. But in reality Cloud 1.0 solutions are here just to set the market needs. The Cloud 2.0 and higher versions will give the customer much more flexibility, but also require the need for a consultant.
Where the 1.0 versions are simple to setup and maintain, the 2.0 solution needs more thought upfront and afterwards.

ie.
BPOS in its 1.0 version brings you a very simplified Exchange 2007 solution, Suitable for some customers. Looking at Office 365 you receive almost a full blown Exchange 2010 solution.
I expect this to be even more customizable in the next version.

In my search for the changes to my work I try to regulary write a post with my thought around the Cloud and the impact on my work as a consultant.

I'm also planning to present around this topic, so if anyone is interested to see me present around this topic, you're more than welcome to contact me.