(5-Jul-10) EMC's announcement that it plans to shut down Atmos Online for production usage and limit it strictly to a development environment has provided a cautionary note for enterprises looking at cloud services, and for smaller players looking to monetize the cloud. That's the view of Info-Tech Research Group, which concludes that EMC's problems with Atmos Online signals major cautions about cloud services both for potential customers and for vendors.
Last week Atmos Online posted on its' website that they were no longer planning to support production usage of Atmos Online. Going forward, Atmos Online will remain available strictly as a development environment to foster adoption of Atmos technology and Atmos cloud services offered by Service Provider partners who offer production services. Atmos will no longer be offering paid subscription or support for Atmos Online services. Any existing production accounts will not be billed either for past or future usage. They will also no longer provide any SLA or other availability commitment. Without any guarantees for availability of client data, EMC strongly encourages existing customers to move their critical data to one its cloud storage service partners - AT&T, Hosted Solutions, and PEER 1 Hosting - as soon as possible.
So what went wrong?
Info-Tech Research Group's recent vendor landscape on cloud infrastructure service providers ranked EMC as a Rising Star. From conversations with EMC, Info-Tech Research Group felt that they had the market presence to make a considerable impact on the cloud computing landscape, but that their limited marketing push early on was holding them back from being fully recognized and more widely adopted. Apparently, this was a far larger problem than anticipated.