The Big Three want to rule the world, but it’s small businesses like mine that suffer, says Jon Honeyball

There is quite a fuss going on in Germany at the moment about the relationship between Microsoft and children using Office 365 in schools. In a somewhat circular argument, it seems that parents aren’t allowed to give permission for their children to use the service, but the children aren’t deemed capable, either. This has blown up because Microsoft is unable or unwilling to give binding assurances that user data won’t be taken out of Germany, and especially handed over to government organisations in the US. As I understand it, Microsoft previously gave assurances that its cloud service would be available from data centres hosted in Germany, but this has now ceased to be the case. And, since that point, a Mexican standoff has occurred.

Then there are the ongoing discussions about the role of government and the taxation of global corporations such as Google and Facebook. France has decided that it has had enough and wants to sting these corporations with a tax. Not surprisingly, the US isn’t happy about this and the war of words will get worse before it gets better.

At the same time, there are news reports that the massively expensive takeover of Red Hat by IBM is not doing well, and that it can’t bring to market the promised efficiencies and integrations. In other words, it was a large corporate splurge that won’t deliver.

Which brings me to the role of the big players in cloud. If even IBM can’t make it work, who else can bring something to market? And it is a fundamental part of the capability of the cloud infrastructure from the “Big Three” (Microsoft, Amazon and Google) that they have planet-wide services.

I understand the astonishing technology that has been assembled to allow for such enormous deployments in huge data centres around the world. We’re a long way from the days of popping a CD into a drive and booting up an OS. Provisioning of CPU, storage and network infrastructure can all be initiated from the comfort of your web browser, while you sit on the beach sipping a piña colada. And your cloud services can be most anywhere in the world.

Much of this is missing the important point, however. In any discussion, it’s always worth

considering the macro versus the micro. The macro in this space are the capabilities, cost/performance benefits and management tools available to the Big Three. The micro is me and my business.

Let’s say I am headquartered in London and I do business with companies in Europe. I want cloud services to be run out of somewhere in the UK and also within the EU. With the Big Three, I can pick and choose the region where my services will be hosted, and everything is just great.

Except for one small point. I actually don’t give a damn about service provision in Japan. Or Australia. Or Brazil. It might as well not exist as far as my business is concerned. I’m sure that someone based in Rio de Janeiro would have the similar, if geographically modified, view.

So here’s the impasse. The Big Three are providing a level of global scale that’s necessary for them to do what they do. But, if we are to have a truly competitive landscape, we need to be able to buy these services on a real-time spot market. Of course, this desire places us at loggerheads with the Big Three, who want to tie us up in rolling contracts. They’re happy that we can spin up and shut down services as we demand, it’s part of their cloud services fabric, but they want us to stick with them as a vendor.

Cloud services design, looking forward, must be looking at building interfacing layers between the business operation and the cloud service provision. By doing so, we can buy from whomever we like, whether it be one of the global Big Three or a smaller firm 20 miles away. We are being deliberately sucked into a design/deployment model where we can’t do that. All of the Big Three know it’s their cake to carve up between them. And that is the very model of a damaging oligopoly.

It really is time that we recognise that cloud doesn’t necessarily mean “planet-wide” and that a good service provision is one defined by the needs of my micro-sized business, not by the marketing departments of the macro provider. Cloud should be offering us this flexibility, and not merely replacing on-premise lock-in with in-cloud lock-in. A wise organisation would be giving serious consideration to this approach.

To have a truly competitive landscape, we need to be able to buy these services on a real-time spot market