Gartner lists amoungst CEO’s key business priorities that “IT-enabled changes will be a key element in post-recession strategy” – That means IT departments need to be more agile, or they will simply get outsourced. IT doesn’t control the economy, the environment, or the proliferation of technology, but it must deal with these three issues, said Peter.

The issue of business moving to Asia loomed large (as mentioned in the keynote earlier in the day). Can you accord a $25/month Salesforce.com solution if you have sales teams that are paid $100/month? We must “revisit behaviours” because the world is changing. The environment we have come into is one that is suffering from an erosion of trust as well – with $30 Billion of Lehman assets being found today, people are questioning the capabilities of businesses.

Risk is not just ‘security’ risk, it is using technology to manage risk across the business (cf BP and risk management). IT also gets to pick up responsibility for dealing with carbon cost remediation, and dealing with the proliferation of devices and data at the same time.

A couple of soundbites from Peter:

• “There are a billion transistors for every human on early”
• “The number of SMS messages on a daily basis, exceeds the number of people on earth”
• Don’t find the new things in the data centre, it is at the edge where data is created.

The end user owns and innovates. The job of IT is now to facilitate that.

Social Computing was identified as trend #1.

“Business that block access will be loosers, those that support it will be winners” Peter Sondergaard.

Trend #2: Device proliferation. The ongoing consumerization of IT. Different device form factors, entertainment, and always on technology. The term “context aware computing” was new buzz word of the session for me – IT that knows: Who you are. Where you are . What you are doing. “Location is the key to context, and time is the trigger.”

Trend #3: Advanced analytics. Not the backward looking analytics that we are used to, but forward looking-pattern sensing models that sense weak signals in the data, and bring those signals back into the organistion to inform and alter strategy. Interestingly the examples Peter gave were, to me at least, actually ones that used social technology to connect consumers and product organisations.

Trend #4 Cloud computing, or rather its evolution. It is clear that everyone is still struggling to define what cloud computing is. Gartner has their one definition, but everyone, not just every organisation, but individuals too, have their own perspective. There are key themes though: service elasticity, scalability and internet technologies.

Peter gave a touching eulogy for Unified Communications – A technology full of promise, that has been firmly jumped by social media. That’s not to say people aren’t deploying it – there are, in droves, is is just that it has moved along the hype cycled to deployment and is now business critical and business sensible. It’s just that the ‘spotlight’ has moved on. Unified Communications is business as usual.

Garnter reaffirmed that mobiles (smart phones) are the emerging path to a ubiquitous technology platform. We are only a few years away from 80% of users having smart phones (if we aren’t there already). That’s world changing stuff.

All-in-all, a lot to digest. There was a healthy Q&A with Orange Business Service customers at the end, with Cloud Computing being a clear top of the agenda. From my perspective, being a CIO has never been more challenging. Now, it’s been getting harder from a long time.

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A bug has also emoerged in the latest version of Apple’s OS X, So the problem isn’t just with cloud services. This from the Guardian:

Apple has admitted that its latest operating system harbours a bug that can accidentally delete data belonging to the computer’s owner. The glitch occurs when some users who upgraded to the Snow Leopard – which was released at the end of August – log into a “guest” account on their machines. When they log back in under their own name, all of the files in their home directory – such as documents, music and videos – have been deleted.

Leading to some annoyance on the Apple discussion forums. OS X does include back up software (aka “Time Machine”) which enables users with back ups to restore their data. The moral? If your data is stored in the cloud, make sure someone is responsible for back ups – either by keeping a copy on local storage, by backing up to another provider, or by ensuring that your provider is responsible for back ups – although a recent informal survey of providers Ts and Cs left me distinctly unimpressed. Most of them boiled down to “we’ll try and backup your data, but we might not, and even if we do, we are committing that we’ll get your data back” – and that was for paid back up services!

Data is still data, wherever it is. Hard drives fail and operational errors happen. An independent (and separate) back up is the best insurance you have against these failures.

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Today was CloudForce in London – SalesForce.com’s big event, which is touring the world, and touted as “your chance to get the insight you need to take advantage of cloud computing and salesforce.com applications in 2009.” And that’s probably where the problem starts. There wasn’t much cloud on show, at least not cloud computing as I understand it.

They had me in the palm of their hand. I was waiting to be wowed. Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s highly energetic Chairman and CEO took to the stage and had at it like a fervent preacher, although one who’d slightly forgotten his gospel, having to glance down at his autocue as he stumbled over customer and competitor names, but that didn’t dim his obvious passion for what SaleForce.com had to offer. SalesForce.com has done a great job of selling to sales people. It is an excellent pipeline management tool for sales managers, and dashboard provider for exec teams, and I’ve used it successfully from both of those angles in the past.

However, during the day, salesforce was promoted as a customer service management tool, a financial data management tool, a content management tool and a social media monitoring tool. That’s a big stretch from where they started. Add to that, a firm claim on the cloud space. Benioff said that they had been “talking cloud” for ten years.

Salesforce.com is certainly evolving from a SaaS-based CRM provider, where it has done well, to a PaaS (platform as a service) provider. That puts it on a direct collision course with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft’s emerging Azure platform, as well as Google’s very own App engine. Those are big players, one’s that know their apples and pears.

During the morning Benioff made a big play about their ‘live demos’ and that’s where the wheels came off for me. Not in the demos themselves, they were super slick and flawless, almost too good to believe. And indeed they were. Orange was touted as a major customer, with 10,000 Orange customers claimed to be using SalesForce.com’s Facebook monitoring application. The problem was, the orange customer service twitter account used in the ‘live demo’ was a fake, as Redmonk’s James Governer discovered after tweeting about it (tweets in reverse chronological order):

And digging into the account they used as the example customer, well, that was a fake too, as you can see from their stream:

2 updates, 4 followers. In fact there’s a veritable ecosystem of fake accounts around ddbenson. Now, I have nothing against demos with dummy accounts. I’ve done the occasional one myself. Sometimes needs must, and they are important to protect people’s privacy, but when you do them, call them as such. Both James and I had asked our Twitter followers if they had any experience of interacting with Orange customer services via twitter. That’s a good few thousand people between the two of us. The answer? Nothing. Not a sausage. And why would there be? If Facebook asked you to install a SalesForce.com app into your profile would you? No, you probably wouldn’t. I even trawled Facebook trying to find this mystery app, but couldn’t see anything with more than 40 users. I’m clearly missing something here, since the Facebook integration was heavily promoted during the day.

There was much talk of how great SalesForce.com is, what wonderful things they do and their commitment to ‘the social contract’ (and their 1:1:1 model) and heavy claims for their social media credentials. A fair few people left during the keynote session, some tweeting their departure, and there was a general shuffling of feet around me as the pitch went on.

The sales pitch just didn’t seem to be connecting with those around me. Sure, the bloggers and journalists were comfortable at their big desks, with coffee and Ethernet connections, but talking to the customers and potential new SalesForce.com users in the pews, there seemed to be a general disquiet. “How am I going to use this for my support organisation?” asked one attendee, “the maintenance windows don’t allow me to run 24/7″. And indeed, while SalesForce.com proclaims >99.9% (the same uptime as this web hosting provider), that doesn’t include the scheduled maintenance windows, when they do their software upgrades. That’s the “No software” company’s software upgrades.

They are certainly transparent about system availability, with a real-time view of their operations, although that is fairly standard for a large service provider these days.

no software dude hugs me at cloudforce 09 on 12seconds.tv

Now, maybe I’m just smarting because I didn’t get hugged by the no software guy, but maybe that was because he was keeping his distance. I wanted to ask about the software the sales team had to run on their Blackberries to use SalesForce.com. I wanted to ask about the iPhone software from SalesForce.com. I wanted to know if they were going to support the Nokia platform that I happen to like, and what their plans were for Windows Mobile. Lots of software to ask about.

Anyway, you can watch the whole keynote - the SalesForce.com team got the content up quickly. I’ll write more about the new features just as soon as I have checked them out.

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The definition of ‘cloud’ computing and services is undergoing distortion on a daily basis, as vendors pile on the bandwagon, eager to ‘cloud-ify’ their wares. That’s just one of the prices of fame. Stepping away from that set of issues for a while, the critical reasons that cloud computing needs good standards can get a little lost if you get stuck down in the operation weeds. To quote myself, from the post on RedMonk, seeing as IT Knowledge exchange picked up on it:

It is clear that without standards of one kind or another (de-facto or from a recognised body), there won’t be a market, and without a market, the cloud is unlikely to thrive. The competition isn’t as much between cloud providers, as it is between cloud providers and internal IT organizations. Cloud providers need to keep that firmly in mind.

Let me draw some parallels with the early days of the broadband DSL market in the 90s. For many years the market for DSL was caught up in the battles between different hardware+software vendors, each out to prove that their version was better than the others. Eventually the market settled on a standard (initially ADSL). Equipment prices fell. On the face of it, not a good thing for the vendors, but actually revenues soared, as customers started to feel safe in making purchases, knowing that they were no longer reliant on a single vendor. If they needed to change providers they could. More importantly, tendering became a competitive process – something that enables a market to come alive.

The broadband market didn’t learn from this lesson for long. Soon the broadband providers, rather than the equipment vendors, were at each other’s throats, fighting for subscribers. It was the wrong battle. They fought over the 1% of users who had figured out what DSL was. Those early adopters had figured out that it would given them their downloads faster, and the providers ignored the 99% of the market who had no idea what “digital subscriber line” technology might do for them, or why on earth they might want it.

Back to the cloud. The current variations in storage architectures, database technologies and support of network features all contribute to blocking migration between services and inhibiting the market. To be fair, some of these things will end up being market wide innovations, or competitive differentiators, but for now most of them just stop development efforts being portable, and mean that there is no ‘back up’ option in the event that a provider fails. Sure, IBM are muscling in on the cloud action with their “cloud validation service“, and other kite mark efforts will attempt to validate individual providers as good fellows, but that won’t build a sustainable market. Today’s hero is tomorrow’s three day outage, and if you can’t move your application you are probably yesterday’s business.

It is unlikely that a single body will be able to standardize all of the different aspects involved in a full cloud service. Even if they could, standards bodies always struggle to keep up in rapidly developing space – I should know, I’ve suffered in enough of them. It may be that we settle on a lowest common denominator approach for now, and a core set of functionality emerges across providers. Alternatively, development tools might get smarter at providing a “write once, run anywhere” solution.

Regardless of how we get there, the cloud needs some form of standardization, so that a market can emerge and thrive. From my days working with VCs, I remember a phrase “if you haven’t got any competitors, you haven’t got a market, and you have a problem.” Right now no-one is tackling their biggest competitor in the space: Do nothing.

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The fact that a few hundred people came out on a cold wet London night to discuss Cloud Computing is a testimony to the growing fascination with all things cloud-like. One way or another, it is a phenomenon that will disrupt the status quo in software and service provision.

The evening kicked off with a set of speedy presentations: 5 minutes per presenter, brutally speedy. Their velocity and compactness made them hard to summarize, but let me try:

Simon Wardley, now with Canonical, was first on stage. Always an interesting presenter (I might have been biased by his love of ducks and the fact I that I was using his power supply, stealthily borrowed). Actually, the fact that I could use his power supply on my laptop is a testament to the importance of portability and the power of re-use, which was the theme of Simon’s presentation. It continued his XaaS theme from the last CloudCamp, making the case for the importance for standards. Simon also argued for the importance of transparency in cloud services (cf. recent happenings in the financial world as the result of opacity). Who owns and operates the equipment isn’t always obvious in cloud services. An immaculately timed 4 minute 59 second presentation.

Joe Bagley, CTO Europe of Quest Software, was next up, asking if the cloud is really green. Here we are, putting 20kw of power demand into a rack, then trying to keep it at  22′c. Less than 0.3% of the electricity used makes it through to the processor. Rather than looking at how much processing each watt gives, Joe argued that the new question people will ask is: for each service in use, how much energy is consumed? Server power consumption doesn’t scale linearly with use. An idle server still consumes huge amounts of power. Even so, virtualization doesn’t give the power savings many expect. Even worse, while VDI (desktop virtualization) is trendy, it moves even more processing into the datacentre and uses lots of RAM, and therefore even more energy. Then you throw away the old desktops… definitely not very green. Joe’s advice? Go green: take a hybrid approach, re-use and rethink. Oh, and make sure you get the (power) bills. (4 minutes 50 seconds).

Paul Watson, of Newcastle University, has been doing some work on behalf of Arjuna.  Throw away the cloud infrastructure, or get cloud from existing infrastructure? Paul suggested that you should create a private cloud, and spread the load. Put service agreements on sharing resource in place, and then share computing resources between different departments to make efficient use of (unused) computing power. Then link that to public cloud services to cope with peak demand. Paul’s model suggests the idea of many federated clouds (both public and private) – a kind of cloud of clouds. Interesting.

Duncan Johnston-Watt, Enigmatec CTO, performed a canned demo (using Elastic fox), showing how the cloud might be used for disaster recovery. Apart from his very correct use of the work “momentary”, the demo was a little pedestrian. Thankfully Cisco’s Phil Dean hopped on stage to tell us what CIOs want from the cloud. A reminder from Phil that CIOs are seeking to be business leaders. Accord to him CIOs like Cloud’s offer of consistency for all users, service simplicity (cost and 24×7 operation) and service orientation (for business agility). They don’t like the loss of control, risk management issues (business continuity and security) or migration and hybrid operation. I found myself thinking that perhaps CIOs don’t understand Cloud Computing yet, and are still wrapped around the axle trying to understand Web 2.0. Never the less, cloud needs a business focus says Phil.

Zimory’s Philipp Huber used his commanding stage presence to talk about what pervasive cloud computing might look like. He wheeled out comparisons with the energy market. Why does the energy market run so smoothly? Multi-tier supply – energy products, distributors, resellers – and 100+ years to get where they are. Both private and commercial demand, with well educated customers, and well established infrastructure standards (fuses, plugs… ). SLAs and quality standards, operating in an open market. How does cloud computing compare? New cloud providers emerging daily. Increasing demand, but driven by early adopters. The early majority still has major concerns about security and stability. Standards are emerging, but still not providing a seamless experience. Full interoperability is still “in the clouds” – fundamentally it works against the cloud producers, since it reduces stickiness. Billing models need to be transparent between clouds too, and easy to understand – again, something that might not be immediately attractive to providers.

Rhys Jones (from RBS) laid out an IT department perspective in “Clouds are cool (so why aren’t we using them yet)”. Power is nothing without control was his cautious note, before laying out some key benefits from his perspective: Switching from capex to opex is attractive. Cloud can do things that couldn’t be done before (due to resource constraints). Cloud gives ability to scale down (relevant currently). Someone else can do the optimisation, leaving you free for higher value activities. Rhys doesn’t see the cloud as just another form of box rental. Because of the cost structure, it enables rapid, low-risk trials – that opens up new possibilities for innovation. He noted that moving to the cloud is a cultural shift, and changing culture is hard. In corporate IT, demand outstrips supply, and the demand has always been upfront. That steers against Cloud technology.

Wayne Horkan, Sun Microsystems CTO (UK and Ireland), talked about the global cloud infrastructure build out. A little unsurprisingly, he sees cloud computing as becoming dominant. He cited bandwidth figures from Amazon showing S3 using more bandwidth than Amazon web sales – I’m not sure that’s a proof point, but interesting none-the-less. Wayne said, “This is the Klondike gold rush…” – I agree that the building wave is definitely starting to feel that way. Wayne drew out a nice layered model, from network up to operations…. “What’s the next stack?” open source he says. Wayne ran out of time and was gracefully ushered from the stage by a gracious host.

Neil Hutson, senior director at Microsoft, outlined their vision. Drawing a linear platform evolution from mobile, to client, to server, to cloud, Neil outlined the changing economics of software towards a consumption based model. He pointed out that Microsoft already run their own data centres, and have done for a long while, supporting their Live offerings. He outlined the Microsoft Azure announcement, and the themes contained in it: standards and simplicity, and citied support for HTTP, REST, SOAP…. The Azure announcement has been covered just about everywhere, so nothing new to add. Only time will tell where it goes…

[Open Spaces Round up next...]

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• Acquired on-line storage company Jungle Disk.
• Acquired specialist hoster Slicehost. (see Rich Miller’s post)
• Struck a CDN Deal with Limelight Networks (detail at CloudPundit)
• And launched a cloud strategy with Cloud Sites, Cloud Files and Cloud Servers.

I think they’ve rather swallowed this cloud computing thing, and swept in talent from the space. This week’s ecommerce expo in London gave me the chance to catch up with Fabio Torlini, Marketing Director of Rackspace.

We had a very feet-on-the-ground discussion around cloud computing. Fabio agreed that cloud wasn’t the future for everyone, but that it made sense for some. Rackspace sits very much at the premium end of the market, catering to mission critical needs. This has kept them clear of the commoditization of hosting, letting them invest in quality support and adopt a packaged approach to meeting customers’ needs.

I know from my time in the Valley that many a start up owes its success to Rackspace offerings, keeping servers going in all Internet weather. Cloud services haven’t had a great reputation, with some big players suffering a number of big outages. Fabio sees cloud services as a lower-SLA form of service. I’m not sure that I totally agree – cloud brings with it a very different philosophical approach than the one used to build web-applications on dedicated services. But there is a good argument for using cloud-based services for applications with elastic capacity demands and less stringent availability requirements.

Hosted and cloud services alike are a good way of moving spending from CAPEX to OPEX, smoothing big capital expenditures into recurring operational costs. That makes even more sense in times like today, when budgets are tight. It is also a more success-based model, since you buy more services as and when you have the business growth to justify them. No point being stuck with a huge, out of date building and servers for a business that didn’t hit its growth targets.

Another advantage of moving applications into a hosted environment, or for that matter a cloud, is gaining the economies of scale that a company like Rackspace have. Very few businesses would be able to afford to build their own state of the art data centre to match the recently opened facility in Slough. Rackspace understand dealing with customers directly, and also working with partners. According to Fabio, they have a strong channel model, with about half of their business being indirect.

Competition in the space is intense. When the likes of Amazon (with their S3 offering now out of beta) and Google appear in the competitive landscape, it is time for some strategic thinking and action. Even more so when Microsoft decide that they want to play in the cloud too. While many providers at ecommerce expo were holding their heads in their hands, Rackspace seem to be keeping their head above the clouds (don’t groan!). Their very high service levels, and the addition of some leading-edge cloud-based offerings, keep them at the top of the game.

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If you are in the UK and interested in finding out more about Cloud Computing, this is probably the best place to come and listen. The previous event was excellent (and packed). As ever, I’ll be there with my camera, and blogging what I learn…

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VMWare’s recent woes are well documented, a recent article on The Register gives a taster. Executive shuffles and iffy patches certainly haven’t helped the company’s image in recent times. But it isn’t all doom and gloom. The new CEO has been well received in some quarters and they have also announced a collaboration with Cisco to accelerate the virtualization of the data center.

The benefits of server virtualization are fairly widely understood (some of the main points were touched on in the “data center efficiency” post here a while back). Many people are also using VMWare on the desktop too, generally to support multiple operating systems at once. It is a big win for IT staff and programmers who have to cross between different platforms to get their jobs done. Virtualizing the OS means you get to work from one machine, but can quickly switch operating systems as and when you need to.

Things haven’t stood still on the server side though. The latest version of VMWare Fusion lets you go headless, meaning that the virtual machine has no consoles connected to it. Very useful in the data centre.

VMWare is also hooking itself to the Cloud, but not irrevocably so. Whilst they have strong competition, their technology remains strong. They know their space well and have responded to the challenges their users face.

With the introduction of new technologies such as VMotion (nicely explained in the depths of James Urquhart’s post on the VMWare and Cisco initiative) and vStorage, to go with vCloud – you get vNaming idea, right? – they continue to push the virtualization envelope.

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Meanwhile, ZDNet’s “Netbooks just want to be free” reports on the Asus bundle available in the UK, which gets you an Eee PC 2GG and a USB modem with a two-year data contract. That has got to be worth thinking about for a mobile workforce.

I’m addicted to my trusty Samsung Q1 (even though it’s due an upgrade now that it has been replaced by the Q1 Ultra). It is super compact and obviates the need for a keyboard with its touch screen. The poor windows tablet seems like it has been languishing a bit of late, which is a shame, as I think it is the most underrated piece of productivity technology out there. Apple might even be heading into the tablet scene itself, according to filings discussed by Apple Insider.

The Windows Tablet built in journal application is great, but Microsoft OneNote takes the concept onto a whole other level (nice example from lifehacker: Microsoft OneNote is a Note-Taking Power Tool - over 100 comments on that post). Tony Lock even blogged over at IT-Director.com “Time To Take the Tablet – Vista’s unsung platform” singing its praises and asking ”why is there very little marketing of this platform or associated business solutions? “.

Tablet PCs get away from the sub-standard sized keyboards that limit the usability of many ultra portables out there. Removing the keyboard constraint also allows for an even smaller machine. That makes an ideal tool for field automation applications and mobile workers. Standard applications can be used, rather than having to write or source apps for the various different flavours of mobile platform. Additionally, the devices are low power and the costs are low and still falling – ticking the green and ecomonical boxes.

Putting the keyboard to one side for a minute (no pun intended), UMPCs/Netbooks also make great cloud computing clients. GigaOM suggests a nice list of ideal features in “What Makes a Cloud Computer?” and reminds me that I should revisit my Digital Nomad check list).

If you are fed up of expensive laptops going astray, and want to reduce employee wear and tear from carrying huge laptops, this is a nice alternative path to getting mobile workers up and going. When you or the team get back into the office, just plug into a full size screen, a USB keyboard and a mouse and you can do the desktop thing – at lower power.

Looking to get a mobile user up and going? It might not be too long until you just point them to the nearest mobile phone shop!

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The post pivots around an interview with Harry Debes of Lawson Software. He predicts that SaaS will go nowhere, putting it in a bucket with ‘service bureaux’ and ‘application service providers’: 

“SaaS is not God’s gift to the software industry or customer community. The hype is based on one company in the software industry having modest success. Salesforce.com just has average to below-average profitability… …One day Salesforce.com will not deliver its growth projections, and its stock price will tumble in a big hurry. Then, the rest of the [SaaS] industry will collapse.

Salesforce.com’s Q2 Fiscal 2009 Financial Results (PDF) put them at $263 Million in revenues and GAAP EPS of $0.08. They were guiding at >$1Billion for FY09 revenues. Lawson’s Q4 2008 revenues were $233 million, so this is big boys talking big talk. Debes again:

“People are stupid. History has shown it repeats itself, and people make the same mistakes.”

Selling services and selling products are fundamentally different. Yes, the big software houses sell services to back up their product offerings, but that is very different than being a services-lead business. Customers expect different things, which makes it very hard to transition from one to the other. Few businesses have done it successfully.

If you are looking to SaaS, you want to choose a supplier that has a good attitude towards data portability and security and an exemplary ability to manage and run data centers to strict SLAs. Either that or back-off to someone who has, and then have robust processes between the customer and that third party. That’s a very different set of attributes than you’d be looking for in an on-premise software vendor.

With the SaaS market growing so rapidly, that’s going to result in green eyes over in the on-premise software camp. Vendors can’t run build out SaaS on a product business model. The economics are different, and are currently changing rapidly. Back to Debes again:

“all your costs are up front and your revenue is over a five-year period, the more you sell, the more you lose… …You don’t break even till the four-and-a-half-year mark, but here’s a bigger problem: there’s no guarantee that that customer is still going to be yours in four years’ time”

The last part is exactly why businesses should be looking at SaaS – more leverage over the vendors. Yes, that’s bad news if you are a vendor, but only if you are afraid to play in a more competitive field. As to the economics, the SaaS vendors now have the opportunity to back the up front costs off to a Cloud service. These days, if a service is loosing more the more it sells, it’s time to take the product manager outside for a quiet word. There really is no excuse.

What we have is a win-win for the user and the application provider. The service bureaux was a rather wonderful thing, I’m just about old enough to remember them. They had a long and profitable life, and let businesses get on with their business. New applications could be turned up rapidly, and you had the benefit of their scale and buying power.

The ASPs got killed in the aftermath of the dot com bust, essentially collateral damage. So I’d say Debes is wrong, dead wrong. Far from off-premise software being a blip, I’d argue the exact opposite – our love affair with the PC and on-premise software is the blip. SaaS and Cloud Computing are simply the industry reverting to sanity.

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Clouds in the Setting Sun

Cloud computing blogs are popping up all over (James Urquhart’s “The Wisdom of Clouds” being a personal favorite - check out his updated “Cloud Computing Bill of Rights“). But what exactly is cloud computing?

Cue “Cloud Computing Defined” on Mashable. The post went up before the weekend, its the conversation in the comments I’ve been watching. Cloud Computing is somewhat blackbox-like for those trapped outside. All the more reason for a good definition, and a good understanding of you might be dragging your business into (or at least the IT infrastructure).

Starting for what it isn’t, Mark Hopkin, on the Mashable blog, quotes Mike Elgan (the names are dropping left, right and center(re) ):

“Cloud computing” has been used to mean grid computing, utility computing, software as a service, Internet-based applications, autonomic computing, peer-to-peer computing and remote processing. When most people use the term, they may have one of these ideas in mind, but the listener might be thinking about something else.

Or to put it another way, it is the marketing umbrella of the day (Kool-Aid if you must). OK, so what should we be looking out for in cloud then? In the 90′s, in my consulting engineering days, we would draw grandiose architecture diagrams. In the middle would be clouds.

The clouds represented the ‘something magic happens in here… will figure out how later’. And for me, that is part of the essence of cloud computing. It takes a boat load of complexity that deals with storage, process distribution and many other things too hard and dull to think about and puts them in a neat box. As a user (in the sense of programmer, as well as end-user), you simply don’t have to worry about what happens in the middle. It just happens, and it is 24×7. I like Doug Klein’s comment:

In the networking cloud bad things happen all the time. Routers die, packets get dropped, loops occur. What has evolved over the decades, however, is a sophisticated and mature set of recovery tools; applications, protocols, processes all designed to detect, work around, patch and recover from failures. For cloud computing to realize its full potential we have to go through the same learning curve. It’s not impossible but it is certainly an order of magnitude more complicated give the much more varied nature of the situation. 

Mark harks back to those early networking days (with a quick name check for MCI nee Worldcom). The fact is, from a technology standpoint it might be tricky to put a finger on exactly what cloud computing is, other than a moving feast, but from a business one it is this: The next generation of IT outsourcing, staring us right in the face.

A little addendum… Even the register is on the case: “Cloud computing: A catchphrase in puberty“.

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Last year Gartner put IT on a par with the airline industry for CO2 footprint (“Green IT: Why it matters” ZDNet). Environmental issues, driven by the Corporate Social Responsibility agenda, are making people to think hard about that power use. But using less energy also saves money, and that is good business sense as much as environmental sensitivity.

Energy is a big ticket item for IT. Cooling uses as much, or more, power as servers themselves, which is creating a spiraling demand. Virtualization has got a new lease of life, speaking a new coat of green paint. It reduces the number of servers and their power usage. VMWare’s Rob Smoot talked though server virtualisation, and also the benefits of virtualization for the desktop. Thin clients reduce power and extend desktop machines life. Sun was ahead of the times after all.

Robb Boyd quotes Doug Gourlay on the history of constraints: first we were space constrained, then cooling constrained and now we are power constrained. Rob Aldrich - Cisco’s Mr Green – focussed on efficiency and sustainability, putting ‘green’ to one side as a politically loaded term. A good point, and a neat angle to follow.

The number of apps and the amount of data will continue to grow (The Exploding Digital Universe). The slight curve ball is where cloud computing plays into this. However, that moves the problem, rather than fixes it. The fact is, it is time to look carefully at IT power consumption, if you aren’t already.

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Before I ask the question, let me answer it: ‘yes, but it depends’. There you go, one sentence and you are totally clued in – rush out and share your new found expertise with whomever you meet. Ok, may be I should wind back a bit.

In the 90′s, IT departments installed LAN servers by the crate-load, giving a central place to share and store data. However, it also meant that you needed network access to get to it. When the network went down, access to your data went with it. Hence Cisco’s slogan in the 90′s: The network works, no excuses.

These days, the defacto network platform is the Internet. We have more and more ubiquitous connectivity, enabling a new generation of apps that have escaped from behind the firewall-locked server farm, into the free-world of the Internet.

It is now easier than ever to process and backup data, share it between companies and individuals, and access it across multiple devices. These applications are still vulnerable to network outages, but the more distributed nature of cloud-based services should, in theory, make them more robust than the previous generation of applications that lived in the server-farm.

Many of the initial applications have been consumer orientated, but that is changing. On one side, IT itself is increasingly consumerised, and on the other, applications themselves are becoming more business centric (SalesForce.com ecosystem, backpack and highrise HQ, etc…).

Businesses now have low-cost access to what were once very expensive applications. We are now in the perfect storm, where IT departments can leverage Internet technology (standards, bandwidth and computing power) to deliver new applications to users.

More on these new services and platforms in the coming weeks…

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