Facebook Suspicious Of The Cloud

Facebook, one of the fastest-growing cloud companies around, keeps personal information on millions of users in the cloud, but isn’t very keen on the cloud when it comes to its own IT management data.

While in San Diego at the Service-now.com user conference, I ran into a couple of IT admins from Facebook who told me they were <i>”thinking about”</i> using Service-Now.com, which provides software that customers can use to manage IT services and internal processes, to manage their IT trouble and incident reports; Facebook currently uses four different applications to perform those tasks, all developed internally, and they wanted to rationalize them into a single system.

But later that afternoon, Service-now.com CEO Fred Luddy told me that Facebook wasn’t <i>”thinking about”</i> anything — the company had actually signed a contract with his company a week earlier. The reason the Facebook admins were being cagey about the deal? Maybe it’s because Facebook decided to host the software itself, rather than let Service-now.com host it. I find it ironic, to say the least, that Facebook, which hosts the loves and lives of its customers within its vast server farms — and which is constantly searching for new ways to monetize that information — is itself hesitant to allow another company to host its IT management data.

While it’s true that the first companies to succeed as software-as-a-service (SaaS) application vendors, like Salesforce.com and Rightnow Technologies, weren’t hosting their customers’ mission-critical applications in the cloud, customers are now buying into the idea that the cloud is at least as reliable and secure as their own internal IT departments. Luddy, whose company is growing at something like a 66 percent clip, told me that more than 95 percent of his customers let Service-now.com host applications for them, and that “fewer and fewer customers host themselves.”

Network switching equipment vendor Juniper Networks is another Service-now.com customer that is itself a technology company; Chris Terzian, an IT manager responsible for service desk implementations, confessed to me that he had himself been reticent about adopting a SaaS application because he worried he would lose control over the data he needed. “I saw it as hands-off, like I would have to ask [Service-now.com] for everything.” But he told me that “those fears dissolved” over time.

Some technology companies, like Microsoft, Cisco and IBM, use their own large employee populations and vast IT infrastructures as proving grounds, “eating our own dog food” being the term of art for this practice. But IT professionals can be as conservative as anyone when it comes to adopting leading-edge technology, particularly when it’s developed by outsiders. Getting IT administrators to give ground isn’t easy, and Terzian told me this kind of shift doesn’t happen without strong leadership from senior management. “The shift has to come from the top down,” he told me.