"Despite all evidence to the contrary, private cloud pundits keep telling us that data governance and application performance will keep workloads firmly entrenched in private data centres, or will capitulate to public cloud with a hybrid model. Of course, Salesforce’s decision to build on AWS calls into question these cosy platitudes"
I think you have to be a little careful here. Salesforce is, itself, a cloud service provider, already committed to the paradigm of doing everything in the cloud almost by definition. Their customers are companies who have already conquered the various barriers to 3rd-party cloud service adoption. It probably matters little to those customers if their data is in Salesforce's own data centers, or some other ?aaS provider's, except as a secondary concern about how reliable and secure it makes Salesforce's own services.
It seems to me that an enterprise that's a potential direct AWS/Azure consumer can have barriers to cloud adoption that Salesforce probably did not. If you're a financial services company, how does cloud adoption fit with the Safe Harbor mess? Is your data highly confidential or even top secret? Do your local internet access provide bandwidth suitable to the scale of data you need to push to the cloud (or pull back) daily?
These are edge cases, perhaps, and edge cases may not be something a sound business model can stand on, but there are also probably better examples I'm not thinking of.
Salesforce's decision is big, but I'm not sure it means exactly what I read the quote above as suggesting it means. "If Salesforce can do it, anyone can" doesn't quite seem the right conclusion to me, because if we assume there are any cases to make for doing some things in-house, I'm not sure any of them would have applied to Salesforce to start with. For them, the decision may have been a no-brainer in ways it wouldn't be for everyone.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
