Cloud Migration Fueled by Choice

Gartner reports that cloud spending will reach the trillion-dollar mark by 2020, signifying a notable “cloud shift” in the market. But why is there so much migration to the cloud? What does it really offer? My hypothesis is that it has something to do with consumer choice, which Wikipedia defines as:

“A branch of microeconomics. … It analyzes how consumers maximize the desirability of their consumption as measured by their preferences subject to limitations on their expenditures, by maximizing utility subject to a consumer budget constraint.”

In short, people are happier with their purchases when the usefulness outweighs the price.

Here’s my definition of consumer choice: You get what you want, how you want it, for a fair price. And that prinicipal is at the core of our Wowza Streaming Engine™ cloud deployment options.

Perhaps you noticed that Wowza announced the availability of Wowza Streaming Engine on Alibaba Cloud. Now, Wowza customers have the ability to effectively extend their reach into China, as well as the rest of Asia. This also adds to our growing list of cloud platform partners, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute and Rackspace.

However, cloud platforms are only part of the story when it comes to enabling our customers. With our Docker image, the developer community now has an efficient, shippable and easily deployable option for running Wowza Streaming Engine. And, let’s not forget Wowza Streaming Cloud, which gives our builder community the ability to skip all the platform decisions and just build their apps from a service.

With most of our platform partners, you still buy a monthly, annual or perpetual license from the Wowza website, and bring it over to your platform of choice to spin up the compute capacity. This is what the industry calls Bring Your Own License (BYOL). But on AWS or Azure, you have the additional option to buy both the Wowza license and the compute capacity directly through the cloud provider of your choice, on an hourly basis. This model can streamline your purchase experience, and is a great option for streaming applications that are temporary in nature.

I’m not going to bore you with all the reasons why you’d want deploy on these platforms or with containers—by now you know this by heart. You’ve probably already made up your mind on whether a cloud deployment is right for your workflow, if you need a hybrid cloud or if you’re sticking to an on-premises solution. Wowza just wants to ensure we’re there for you, wherever you choose to deploy.

And in the end, it’s all about choice. We’ve come a long way from Henry Ford’s famous quote about the Model T:

“Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black.”

I wonder if Mr. Ford ever learned about consumer choice. But then, Mr. Ford never had to consider deploying software to the cloud—and software doesn’t really come in a color.