Improving Cloud Adoption Rates Through User Experience

As product manager at ScaleUp, one of my top jobs is to make sure our cloud management platform has as much impact as possible at what we call the cloud "point of purchase".

This is that magical spot where the consumer and provider meet. It's where consumers locate, order and manage the resources they need. It's the spot where providers manage their users, offer capacity, manage and monitor those resources, charge for them, enforce and apply automation, governance, security and other business rules and ultimately provide a service. In other words, there's a lot going on at the point of purchase.

It doesn't matter if the provider is an enterprise IT department in a private/hybrid cloud or if they are a tiny MSP offering public cloud or anything in between. It also doesn't matter if the user is a business IT user sitting in a cubicle farm or if they are a developer in a garage somewhere - the issues are the same often just with different labels.

Here are just a few of the things we consider every time we want to add something to our platform...

Consumer:

Is not a cloud expert
In general, does not know (or care) about how or why things work
Does not have the desire or time to learn a complex system/process
Wants a single, integrated platform for their IT resources and activities

Provider:

Needs to support a wide range of use cases and user types
Has great technology inside the datacenter, that is their primary focus
Wants to offer complex technology in a simple, self-service manner

Since we launched our cloud management platform two months ago, I spend a good amount of time showing people how we can simplify how they provide and consume cloud services. The response has been fantastic, and the elegant user experience we have created on both sides and in the "point of purchase" is accelerating stalled cloud projects and creating new ones for both providers and consumers. By solving the user anxiety about consuming cloud resources and how they will manage them, enterprises and MSP's are moving forward with cloud products at an accelerated place.

The moral of the story is that while everyone is so focused on what's happening inside the datacenter, perhaps the most important missing link to improving cloud adoption rates in 2011 is what lies outside of the datacenter - the user experience.