Tempers flared on the last day of the North American Hydro-Rotational Molding Systems Association Convention (NAHRMSACon) in East Moline, IL. The meeting, held at the extravagant 45-story Comfort Inn & Suites Downtown, covered a range of issues but focused largely on technology in manufacturing.
At the Amazon Web Services (AWS) booth, marketing representative Misty Billows spoke of the many ways her company could help attendees reach their business goals. She mentioned the company’s strength and pointed to their many datacenters and millions of servers.
Brad Meller, President of Meller’s Mega Molding and this year’s NAHRMSA chairman, said “Hold on, datacenters and servers? You’ve been very aggressive in selling businesses like ours on the power of the cloud. If the cloud so great, why do you still have servers?”
Ms. Billows looked as if a kindergartner had just told her the same knock-knock joke for the fourth straight day, forced a slight chuckle and said “Ahh, that’s a good one.” then looked for someone else to talk with.
Meller spoke up; “I’m sorry if you think that’s a funny question. I’m not one of these techno-heads, and I’d really like an answer.”
The Amazon rep had the half-confused, half-suspicious look often seen on victims of hidden-camera television shows. “Here’s a very simple explanation that anyone should be able to understand” she said. “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources. The key features of rapid elasticity and reserve pooling increase the attractiveness of the cloud model vis-à-vis traditional alternatives.”
Looking as if Billows had replied in Swahili, Brad replied “I just know we were told over and over that we shouldn’t have any servers at all. That they were inefficient and a poor capital investment. So, I’d really like to know why Amazon uses them. Right now, I feel a bit like I bought a pig in a poke. I suppose next you’re going to tell us we’re not mining our data from a deep hole in West Virginia?”
Billows paused and said “Let’s take this offline. We’ll put a pin it, then circle back at the end.”
As the news made its way around the conference, conversations buzzed as attendees registered their collective shock. A visibly upset man who declined to be identified said “We pay for the cloud, and I expect to get the cloud. I’m contacting our legal team today.”
Steve Evans from Roto-Mold Molding said “I would expect some cheap knockoff like Foggy Joe’s Cloud Outlet to pull this kind of bait-and-switch. But she (Billows) says it’s all the big players, Amazon, Microsoft, Google. How long did they think they could keep this a secret?
Another person was heard to say, “I thought everyone in the tech industry was big on eating their own cat food; apparently not.”
Meller’s Mega Molding has not replied to repeated requests for comment.
