With Amazon’s rapid success in the cloud market comes increased awareness of what it can, and even more importantly, cannot do.

The success is easy to explain, with Amazon’s attractive price point and ever-growing set of technical functionality. The roadblock to wider adoption is equally easy to explain:

“Businesses want a full dish to eat, while Amazon serves up ingredients and asks users to get cooking”

AWS works very well as a purely technical standalone platform, and so those were the enterprise early adopter’s use cases: test and dev environments, new standalone outwards-facing web apps, and other sandboxed examples.

The problem is that these are all use cases that remain in the lab, behind the curtain. Sometimes this technical approach can even mean that AWS is introduced surreptitiously, as part of so-called “shadow cloud”.

When it comes to discussions about strategic enterprise cloud platforms, that sort of …