Selling the Cloud Sublime - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 102

to serving or even transforming business, it becomes a critical force in
creating entirely new lines of business (Chappuis 2012).
Chappuis supports this view with several examples, including a phar-
maceutical company that was motivated to revamp its entire customer-
relationship management (CRM) system when it decided to incorporate
detailed molecular information into its existing system. Since the company
did not have the resources to do the job in house, it contracted with a
cloud provider, which provided an app that did the job so well that it con-
vinced the irm to rethink its entire CRM strategy. In another example,
an HR manager wanted to apply analytics to his employee database, and
the cloud provider that solved the problem convinced the manager to
restructure all of its HR systems. Next, a small business with twenty-ive
employees, which did everything in-house, contracted with a cloud com-
pany to host its email. This worked so well that the irm decided to port
its online video to the cloud. When that, too, succeeded, the company
shifted all of its IT to the cloud, saved 55 percent of its IT costs, and was
able to focus on its core business. Finally, Chappuis turns to AWS, which
received heavy criticism in the 2009 McKinsey report for its high prices.
Now the story is about an IT manager who, facing long provisioning times
to stage an app, saved months by turning to AWS, which completed the
job in minutes. Problems associated with locked-in contracts and endless
subscriber payments disappear from consideration as outsourcing to the
cloud becomes, as the cliché goes, a win-win situation (R. Cohen 2013).
To paraphrase a familiar line, we can be assured of three things:
death, taxes, and changing weather. So it should come as no surprise
that McKinsey's forecast would change from “partly cloudy” in 2009
to absolutely sunny in 2012. But the irm's changing forecast also offers
an important lesson in the development of a promotional culture. The
evolving agreement in much of the IT world that cloud computing is “the
next big thing,” guaranteed to grow well into the future and to transform
business in the global economy, does not automatically become common
sense or what scholars call hegemony . Rather, hegemony takes time to grow
and inevitably changes in the face of both internal tensions such as the dif-
ferences in early forecasts between cloud supporters, and external tensions
such as the disagreements between cloud boosters and journalists who
have challenged the cloud because of environmental, security, and labor
concerns. The development of a hegemonic promotional culture is not a