Cloud computing and marketing have one thing in common: They are elastic. You can stretch the term “marketing” to cover everything, from constructing smart “elevator pitches” and making glossy brochures to designing highly technical blueprints and shopping them around to CxOs. The same principle applies with cloud computing. Cloud services are cool smartphone applications, full blown ERP & CRMs but also virtual or physical computing.
However, there is a concept in marketing which is not (yet) so obvious in cloud services. In marketing, we have two distinct segments: B2B and B2C – Business to Business and Business to consumers. B2B means we do business with other businesses like us, meaning wholesale and selling stuff in beige carton boxes and pallets. In B2C we are retailers and sell stuff in fancy glitter cute packages strategically placed in shop windows. Should cloud computing be any different? No.
The people doing technical marketing (including myself) find very easy to categorize cloud stuff and name “distinct” packages and solutions with four letter acronyms (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, DaaS etc). It’s convenient for us, it is something we understand from a technical aspect and it is completely unintelligible from the customer. Would you sell a family car with the term “Four wheel front drive vehicle, 81 kW horsepower, front drive, 1320 kg kerb weight”, or a bulldozer describing it as “tracked vehicle, one seater, yellow with tinted windows”?
Let’s step into the customer shoes. Cloud customers can be smartphone or smartTV users downloading apps that connect to their cloud backend. Or, small businesses looking for a cheap and usable CRM to run their own business. Or an enterprise looking for elastic on-demand computing and storage infrastructure for some new projects. Or a software company shifting their products to the cloud and looking for pay as you go resources for database and application hosting. Or some guy setting up his blog and at the same a small e-shop. All these are cloud customers, but they are not the same: The reds are customers, the blue ones have customers. In other words, red ones are cloud B2C customers and the blue ones are B2B customers: Any organization small or large that consumes cloud resources for internal use only is a consumer, whereas if they consume cloud services to build up services for others have consumers. The same applies to the blogger who starts up a small online shop: He is a consumer of cloud services (blogging) and at the same time will attract customers consuming cloud services.
B2B cloud services are quite different from B2C, regardless of their flavor (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS). B2B offerings address consumers beyond the reach of the cloud provider customer, yet, these consumers utilize the same infrastructure as the Tier-1 customer – the cloud provider infrastructure. Resilience, predictable performance and elasticity are key features here: If the cloud provider infrastructure blows up, your customers’ business will blow up and their customers will be terribly annoyed… Now, if the self service management portal is using a hideous font and tacky colors, that does not matter much. On the contrary, B2C services focus on other attributes: Pricing, usability and evolution are sought after the most by end consumers. Service hiccups can be tolerated, but the service must be smart, fancy, usable and innovative: Your service has to be cooler than the app store next door. Consequently, the entire cloud provider technical and operational stack undeneath has to be structured in an entirely different manner: B2B services should be designed to just work, B2C services should be designed to tolerate failure.
So, maybe it’s time to shift from the established segregation of *aaS acronyms and assorted labeled services and look at cloud services from a different perspective: The customer view. Google have done exactly that. Google focused on B2C from day one, offering free and paid services for the end consumer (Gmail, Docs, Android via OHA) and at the same time capitalizing on these to offer B2B services (advertising, Apps for Businesses, AppEngine, Android market). And it just works.
PS Check out also this cool B2C to B2B domestic example.
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