This anecdote sums up an annoying problem on cloud marketing (and product management):
At the break I chatted with a somewhat bemused attendee who had come in the hope of learning about whether he should migrate some or all of his small company’s server requirements to Azure. I explained about Office 365 and Azure Active Directory which he said was more relevant to him than the intricacies of software development. It turns out that the Azure User Group is really about software development using Azure services, which is only one perspective on Microsoft’s cloud platform.
There are (at least!) two differer buyers for “cloud” now-a-days: the operations and admin staff who keep raw infrastructure an (packaged) applications up an running, the developer who wants to write new code and run deploy it to cloud services to run (or use those cloud services as middleware). Make sure you know which one you are - or which one you’re pitching to!
Of course, there’s “DevOps,” which seeks to conflate the two of them together, which makes it, I guess, a more efficient marketing construct.
And then there’s another group: actual end-users who just want services without all the Morlockian “infrastructure” crap. SaaS!
Once “cloud” and “IT” become synonymous, nailing all these and other fiddly segments is even more important.