Mutualism
“Mutualism” – a cartoon that illustrates how mutualism in nature is similar to the cosey relationships among the leading cloud companies and some of their partners.
In nature, the Egyptian Plover bird keeps the teeth of crocs clean by picking off undigested pieces of meat.
The Plover gets to supplement its diet, while the croc avoids bacteria building up and rotting.
The three ‘big crocs’ in the centralized computing market, AWS, Microsoft and Google, wallow around the watering hole chomping away at corporate IT budgets where cloud instances rapidly balloon into long-term contracts costing an arm and a leg.
The Plover bird equivalent is channel partners (eg. consulting firms like Accenture) who position themselves to customers as best representing them, but in fact, have a ‘remarkable’ tendency to only propose the old crocs.
The Plover’s claim that customers will only buy brand-name cloud solutions and rarely make the investment to learn other solutions in the market does customers a massive disservice.
Perhaps this is why Cloudflare recently announce a $1.25BN Workers Launchpad, which will incent companies to build on Cloudflare’s platform, as a way to find an alternative model to get their product distributed in the market.
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