There is an old (obviously) English saying, warning people not to be "penny-wise and pound foolish." As the main British currency is the pound, 1/100 of which is a penny, someone who is penny-wise and pound-foolish is someone who refuses to invest a small amount now, leading to a much greater cost later. No matter how often I come across companies being penny-wise and pound-foolish, I never cease to be surprised by it.

Having looked at the definition (and misapplication) of cloud, its key characteristics, and the various categories of cloud services, or fill-in-the-blank-as-a-service (*aaS), we now turn our attention to the important difference between true cloud services and hosting services that are marketed as cloud. This is crucially important to vendors and customers! While it may seem, at first glance, as nitpicking, these are very important differences. They will impact a vendor's short-term and long-term profitability, viability and responsiveness, and a customer's ability to rely on a vendor.

Cloud seems to be the biggest buzzword in the last few years. Every technology provider, every services provider, if they aren't natively "in the cloud", they are providing a version of their offering "in the cloud." Although the term "cloud" seems pretty clear to marketers - personally, I am convinced many believe it means, "we can charge more for this if we slap the word 'Cloud' on it" - the majority of people with whom I speak, from engineers and support staff through executives, CEOs and especially customers, do not have a real understanding of what the cloud is, and why it matters.

What does "mind the gap" - familiar to anyone who has ridden the London Underground, a.k.a. "the Tube", have to do with coffee and power? It turns out, quite a bit. Starbucks' largest metropolitan deployment outside the US - and the largest in Europe by far - is in London, with ~250 stores. Starbucks has become a very familiar English site, indeed. On the technology front, Starbucks has always been an early adopter and even a driver of new technologies: