Wikibon’s newest analyst brings with him a healthy dose of “British cynicism,” an extensive background in cloud infrastructure and a belief that complex IT challenges don’t lend themselves to marketing slogans and empty promises.

Steve Chambers’ career in the cloud extends all the way back to 2002 when he joined Loudcloud, the company cofounded by Netscape inventor Marc Andreessen that was one of the first to offer infrastructure as a service. Chambers (right) later worked at VMware, Inc., during its formative years and spent time at Cisco Systems Inc., VCE, Canopy Cloud and Microsoft before joining Wikibon earlier this month.

In other words, Chambers has spent much of his career helping shape the technologies that have coalesced into the modern IaaS revolution.

He’s moving quickly to put his stamp on the Wikibon voice, having penned his first extended post on the risk of “cloud cul-de-sacs” on Wikibon Premium early this week. He also joined Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman for an introductory CUBEconversation just hours after joining the team.

The conversation between the two analysts was dominated by an issue that has vexed IT vendors for years: They talk too much about technology and not enough about practical business value.

Layers eight and nine

Technical virtuosity is rarely what sells a solution, the analysts agreed. Organizational pressures, existing business commitments and perceived value are usually more important. Miniman called people and politics “layers eight and nine” of the network stack.

As a veteran of more than a decade in the cloud technology industry, Chambers has repeatedly seen vendors oversell technology panaceas while ignoring much larger integration problems. “If I believed what vendors were saying I would have thought private cloud and hybrid clouds were there years ago,” he said. “That’s simply not the case.”

Wikibon’s newest analyst came to the CUBEconversation fresh from a meeting of more than 200 small and midsize businesses the evening before. It reminded him that business owners couldn’t care less what technology they use as long as it solves a problem.

“I asked a fellow from an audit company what kind of virtual machines they use and he didn’t know what I was talking about,” Chambers said. “All he needs to do is to make sure his bookkeeper can access the information. The important thing is to look at the problem from the consumer’s point of view, not the cloud provider’s point of view.”

Miniman concurred. “It’s not about who has better IOPS (inputs/outputs per second); it’s about whether the user can get greater productivity,” he said. “Cloud needs to be an enabler.”

User backlash

Cloud vendors and their fans in IT organizations need to be aware of what Chambers called “digital-by-default dogma” when promoting cloud-first policies.

“I know people in the banking industry for whom there’s no way they’re moving applications off the IBM mainframe,” he said, adding that there’s nothing wrong with that.

Meet Steve Chambers in person in London on Friday, April 10, 2015 at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy event. Wikibon analysts David Vellante, Stu Miniman and Steve will provide full coverage on theCUBE.

Vendors could benefit from learning more about how customers really make decisions, including customers outside of the data center glass house. “People who are very technology-focused forget that the guy signing the checks has a lot of pressure on him,” from other corners of the organization, Chambers commented. “The reality is that procurement strategy dictates IT strategy. If you’ve got a three-year agreement with vendor X, then that’s a good reason not to go with Amazon.”

For all these reasons and more, the cloud scene is going to be complicated and messy for some time, the analysts agreed. But is that a problem? “I think it’s okay to be a mess. That’s what life is like,” Chambers said. “I just don’t think there’ll be one standard definition private cloud. Cloud is a journey, not a destination.”

And despite huge price and feature wars now going on, the cloud market also won’t be a winner-take-all, Miniman commented. Rather, he expects it to stratify into a few “megacloud” vendors a legion of specialty providers focused on specialty areas. “There are lots of companies doing interesting stuff like Rackspace and IBM with Bluemix, and there’s lots of room for them to grow,” he noted.

Regardless of how the market shakes out between public, private and hybrid clouds, Chambers asserted that the technology is a game-changer that will ultimately enable all organizations to operate more efficiently.

“Cloud is helping to free people,” he said. “You can get someone to do your bookkeeping online instead of hiring a bookkeeper. You don’t have to buy your own equipment. Your cost of entry into a market is much lower. You can set up a business much more cheaply these days because of cloud.”

And that’s going to really make things interesting.