Something is very definitelyhappening in the Cloud. There are too many initiatives together in the
UK this month to be mere coincidence, so it’s my belief that the topic
might not be on the verge of going completely mainstream, but it
definitely is at an inflection point and about to break out of what
Gartner would call the hype cycle so that it becomes significant. The upcoming Cloud Computing World Forum
on the 22nd which I’m chairing (more of that in a later post) comes at
a perfect time to help explain and demystify the topic for the UK
market. Before then I know there will be an announcement of an
initiative with a distinctly European flavour, and then on the 28th the Intellect SaaS Group
will be launching a white paper aimed at making the business case for
SaaS for decision makers in all sizes of business. Yesterday I was at Softworld,
attending a Cloud Computing panel session and visiting all of the
online accounting players gathered in one corner (or ghetto as someone
described it) of the exhibition hall. It’s very difficult to avoid
weather allusions at this point, but you have to admit there is a lot
of it about.
During this year the Cloud Computing term has had a
mixed press, with as many enthusiasts presenting it as the future of
IT, as detractors who are concerned the term is being overhyped with
marketers keen to capitalise on use of the label on their products
wherever possible. As always, the truth is between the two extremes.
The benefits on offer mean the Cloud needs to be seriously considered
as a technology choice for anything from small businesses through to IT
departments in large organizations. However, at that Softworld Cloud
panel session I mentioned, after half an hour of introductions and
explanation from representatives of CODA, Mamut, salesforce.com and NetSuite, Richard Messik of Vantis
asked the panel if we are going to get the message across to business
people when all the audience had heard so far was jargon. His
interjection was spot on. Richard is a big Cloud and SaaS fan – his
practice has been offering online solutions to their clients for over 5
years and so he speaks from real world experience.
So what is this Cloud term all about? As usual with IT everything is cyclic and many of us remember bureau systems, hosting or ASP. Way back in 1966 Canadian electrical engineer Douglas F. Parkhill wrote The Challenge of the Computer Utility, where he predicted that the computer industry would work like a public utility:
The
Cloud term itself has been around since 1999 to describe access to
resources somewhere on the Internet, but the meaning has now coalesced
to cover three broad categories of services using the power and
flexibility of the Internet as their delivery mechanism. They are:
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
is an evolution of traditional hosting and provides server capacity and
storage. This is utility style computing, where customers can buy the
power they need as a fully out-sourced service without the IT
management headaches, and with the flexibility that the resources can
be quickly scaled up or down to match demand.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
means a web hosted application development platform or framework,
without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the layers of
software and hardware required . Web applications and services can be
prototyped and tested rapidly, and then scaled to a larger user
community.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
is a catch all term for business applications and services provided
over the web. The term covers a range of possibilities from ERP style
business applications, to collaboration and productivity tools, to
plug-ins for application components like payment gateways or mapping
services.
SaaS and Cloud based applications have been available for some years with the success of salesforce.com’s CRM application often mentioned as the “poster child” for the topic. A few weeks ago V3 quoted my friend David Tebbutt of Freeform Dynamics
explaining their survey of 477 organisations last year which suggested
that although 49 per cent were not yet using cloud computing, 41 per
cent were using some cloud resources on a piecemeal basis, and 10% were
adopting it enthusiastically.
So here are a few more Cloud related “events”. In that article, Freeform Dynamics were launching their Cloud Computing for Dummies book, backed by Microsoft (you can request a copy via techaudience@bitepr.com). I’ve already mentioned the Intellect SaaS Group, a technology trade association group formed to promote the topic to UK business. Three months ago BASDA, the Business Application Software Developers Association, formed a Cloud SIG
(Special Interest group), and they are also targeting publishing
materials by the end of this year. During this year there have been
significant offerings announced by Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and
many others. All of this activity around the Cloud and SaaS topic
highlights that over half of businesses and IT departments are
considering it, but I am convinced there is still plenty of confusion
over the basics for the average business person.
I’m afraid it’s
too easy for evangelists and enthusiast like me to fall in to the trap
of focussing on the technology, or for the buyer to ask whether they
should be considering Cloud technology. The real issue is what are the
business benefits. There are significant benefits to be had where
providers can make use of the economies of scale and sharing resources
across their whole customer base so that costs are reduced for each
individual customer. Applications can be more easily and quickly
deployed and the risks reduced by rapid provisioning, testing and
proving of a small pilot, which is then rolled out to a larger user
community. The Cloud vendors have a completely different approach to
the software life cycle, with continuous improvement rather than the
timed and potentially disruptive, major software releases of the
traditional vendors.
As well as those basic benefits, there
are more potential advantages that come as a natural by-product of the
Internet based approach. Business application providers are learning
from the ease of use of consumer products like Amazon, or the web 2.0 functionality
and interactivity available from social networking and sharing sites
like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. They are beginning to socialize
their business applications, offering more collaboration functionality,
or the ability to reach out and connect with customers, partners and
suppliers over the web. In addition, now that energy use and green IT
issues are coming to the fore, the Cloud offers potential benefits for
reduced consumption there too.
There are, of course, still
plenty of challenges. With companies adopting a mixed approach,
interoperability between web services and in house systems becomes
important. How safe and secure is the data, and are security,
compliance and data protection being handled properly? How easily can
my company data be retrieved in a usable form to allow switching to an
alternate service? What different questions does the buyer need to
consider when looking at Cloud Computing provider compared to a
traditional IT supplier? Over the coming weeks I’ll be getting in to
the Cloud in much more detail and trying to answer some of those
questions.
(Cross-posted @ Business Two Zero)
