Last month I had the pleasure of visiting one of my favorite cities, London, for GigaOm‘s Structure event. While there I moderated a panel with two very smart individuals, John Cowan, CEO of 6Fusion and James Mitchell, CEO of Strategic Blue. The panel revisited a session we ran alongside Structure in San Francisco earlier in the year – the topic of cloud commodities market – whether or not there is a demand, or even a practical possibility, of creating a marketplace where a third party can broker deals between suppliers and consumers of cloud computing resources.
It was a timely session, the very same week 6Fusion announced a IaaS trading marketplace. Much of our discussion centered around the fact that AWS isn’t keen to trade compute power via third party agents – both Cowan and Mitchell were adamant that AWS’s blessing for an open market isn’t a requirement for success.
The bottom line for me is that while all of the brokerage vendors (and included in that is Zimory who is reportedly powering the marketplace being set up by the Deutsche Boerse) remain adamant that this opportunity exists, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Until one of these vendors really creates a break out success were both buyers and sellers see enough advantage to adopt the platform, it’ll all remain theory. Attractive and logical theory, but theory nonetheless.
