Federal Cloud RFI - a boon or a boondoggle?
Suddenly in the last few weeks, I have received from multiple prospective customers a copy of the Federal Cloud Computing RFI which the government posted a month ago on its purchasing website (the deadline has passed, by the way.) It's a long, complex set of questions for cloud computing providers that covers Infrastructure as a Service characteristics and standards compliance. Clearly the people who wrote knew what they were doing, but it's also pretty clear that not every agency and division in the federal government needs to have a "yes" answer to each of the questions: they were probably compiled by summing the potential needs of all agencies to allow the purchasing office to suggest the best solution for each need.
So it's all the more surprising to get the same RFI from commercial customers, since it's highly unlikely that any one of them will have all the same requirements as the sum total of all the federal agencies! Presenting such a set of requirements to a vendor has two results: it slows the response of the vendor to meeting their customer's true needs, and it may cause the customer to eliminate the best vendor for their needs because they are being compared against others that may have more checkmarks on the list of items in the RFI, but not necessarily a better solution for a particular need. So, by diverting the discussion away from what customers really need for their businesses to comparing who is the "best" cloud vendor, the true benefits of the cloud may well be denied or delayed to businesses that could start enjoying them immediately. As I often tell prospective Cloud customers, the best vendor is the one with an offering that matches your needs most closely.
Some of you reading this will probably take it as me "whining" that the list of requirements is too difficult to comply with or even reply to. Fortunately, ENKI was able to reply to the government within just enough time to meet the deadline (boy, were my fingers tired!) And, I think we have a leading position in meeting many of them, though we certainly haven't answered "yes" in all areas. What I'm more concerned about is that this federal cloud RFI will increase the cost and completion time for sales, which in turn makes cloud more expensive to the end customer.
As a metaphor, I think we can agree that everyone wants a Ferrari, but most end up with Toyotas. Why is that? It's because of pricing. Pricing is the single most effective way to communicate value from vendors to customers. And unfortunately, the cloud industry is still too young to have solid pricing for many of the items in the federal cloud RFI, perhaps because as in our case, we see little actual demand for them. This causes customers to in turn make irrational buying decisions, because the data to make rational ones isn't out there. Using my analogy, if Ferrari had introduced their cars without a price, people might assume they would cost the same as a Toyota or just a little more, and flock to the showrooms, clogging them with looky-loos who in the end would not buy.
What I *do* think is good about the RFI, since it seems to be circulating widely, is that it will start the discussion on what is important and what is not from the Cloud. In the meantime, I am going to be spending quite a bit of time explaining to many of my customers why they don't need a Ferrari to take their kids to school!
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