Cloudy with a Chance of Leverage

Today’s CIO journal published a piece doing a compare and contrast between the big 3 of cloud computing. There were several things of note, but one particular line caught my attention: “Amazon.com appears most willing to enter into customized agreements with its larger customers…” Amazon is, from the sounds of the article, most willing to create some level of customization in their offering. However, only for larger customers. I get this. Losing one small customer is unlikely to have a significant impact on bottom line. Losing one big customer would be a different story.

In many areas, to offset this large customer gets the perks approach, smaller customers can band together to generate the leverage that they cannot enjoy individually. It occurs to me that this could be possible in the cloud. That is, some form of consortium could form to negotiate pricing, SLA, and other topics of interest. Of course, small users could opt for other cloud providers that have a better offering in terms of price and control. However, for many there are solid reasons behind wanting to stick with a major player, and a consortium would allow greater opportunity.