Cloud computing seems to reach the “Peak of Inflated Expectations“. Even Larry Ellison admits it:

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”

In “Peak of Inflated Expectations” phase, a frenzy of publicity typically generates over-enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations. There may be some successful applications of a technology, but there are typically more failures.

Usually in this phase the only ones making money are journalists and event organizers. So be aware…

I attended on Tuesday to a Business Continuity conference.

Totally boring!

The conference program stated clearly “business” continuity. Probably none of the presenters have read it

All the presentations were about IT continuity… Plenty of it.

None of the presenters and – apparently – many of the attendees noticed the “business” in “business continuity”

Business continuity is about continuing the business. Or using Wikipedia definition:

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is an interdisciplinary concept used to create and validate a practiced logistical plan for how an organization will recover and restore partially or completely interrupted critical (urgent) function(s) within a predetermined time after a disaster or extended disruption. The logistical plan is called a Business Continuity Plan.

I so nothing at the conference about Business Impact Analysis, Threat Analysis, and so on.

Of course no sane business leader will throw money on things he can not understand. Again and again they are presented wonderful projects that aim to virtualize servers, to asynchronously replicate data, to implement “clones” and snap-shots and so on which they tend to reject, and the IT guys complain about “the business guys that don’t understand”.

The same IT guys goes to a doctor and ask him “Doctor, please speak in plain English”!

How about speaking “in plain English” to their business colleagues?