Salesforce CEO: Private cloud is not real cloud

Private clouds aren't "real" clouds? I don't think so! My virtual/hybrid/private cloud infrastructure is just as real as any group of Amazon machine images. Just because our internal requirements demand we keep our applications in-house doesn't mean we aren't benefitting from cloud computing and our own little slice of economy of scale. This is a really bone-headed statement that shows lack of perspective. "If you're not doing like we say it should be done, you're not really doing it." Technological elitism is what that is.

Brisbin true cloud mean not having to worry about existing infrastructure issues. I'm incline to call your private cloud to quote someone 'false cloud.'
Using the hotmail/gmail example. If I subscribe to one of these services I have no infrastructure worries. Everything is done for me in the cloud. Everything from maintenance through to backup.
Having your 'Virtual/hybrid/private' means that you'll still need to send someone to fix that server when its down.
Sorry but that isn't true cloud.

'Cloud' is being bandied about too loosely. There are industries where the latency effect of any public cloud transaction will lead to unacceptable service levels, loss of revenue, etc. Is a private cloud model here then 'outdated' or 'false'? No, instead, we're probably going to see hybrids - portions of the business where you take it in-house (on-premise, private cloud, etc) and where you tap a public cloud infrastructure. Companies that can offer these options, or enable their customers to, will thrive. Companies like SFDC, who *only* have the public model, must continue to flaunt that.

I couldn't agree more with Brisban's comments. Our organization see's tremendous benefit from our private cloud which was specifically designed to meet the requirements of our user's and our business and there is no one sizes fits all solution that is it's equal. The marketing campaigns surrounding cloud have been gearing up for years to support these billion dollar investments and their goal is not to improve customer satisfaction or SLA's it is about expediting the return on that investment. I have one piece of advice to any business centric CIO that is advocating cloud adoption at this stage and that would be to replace your existing infrastructure management and engineering teams with resources that have a solid grasp of technology and more importantly design. With current offerings such as Virtualization, Disk based backup's , 10GB Ethernet, VDI etc..I have not had what you would call a classic infrastructure worry in over 5 years. We are a leader in our industry and to be quite frank my user based would not accept or tolerate hotmail/gmail levels of performance and if I were to advocate that as an option I would be out of a job.

Jassy and Benioff are way off. In fact, the benfits to private-managed cloud far exceed that of a shared model in our estimation. Our model is to virtualize all apps, files, desktops, and data. That eliminates a huge portion of an enterprise's IT costs because the virtual servers are in another location, NOT onsite. Private-managed cloud does not mean ONSITE virtualization, it means your IT is virtualized in a remote data center in private-managed cloud whereby only YOUR OWN enterprise has access to it's own apps, data, desktops etc. All the major cloud players have experienced massive data leaks in one facit or more of their businesses during the last year, their service is dodgey and those contracts are pretty one-sided and ambiguous. You go private-managed and you will know what your fixed costs are and you shouldn't get nickeled and dimed to death. Gotta get back to work now.