A Year in the Clouds - How Cloud Computing Exceeded the Hype

We have now reached that time of year when the great and the good partake in the festive tradition of crystal ball gazing, as they predict the IT industry’s future trends for the next twelve months.
Over the next three weeks or so we will be deluged with various top tens, who will move, who will shake, who’ll hit tech heaven with the next iPad and who will reach tech hell with the next Sega Dreamcast.

It was about this time last year that seemingly every list published featured cloud computing as the number one game changer, the one trend that would have the greatest impact on the delivery of IT services. Some went as far as to predict that cloud should be viewed as the single most evolutionary computing development since the web itself was established. Not many argued against the list compilers rankings, but many viewed the prediction with a healthy pinch of cynicism.
It was Winston Churchill who once famously stated that “It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time.”

We find ourselves one year on, with all of us having been bestowed with that marvellous gift of hindsight, and are now in a position to judge whether the soothsayers were on the money or whether Churchill’s cautionary note rings true.

So in 2010, did we reach for the cloud? The answer has to be a resounding yes, with the reality matching, and quite possibly exceeding, the hype.

Earlier this week, Angus MacSween, industry veteran and CEO of the UK’s iomart group plc told Dow Jones “I have never seen something happen quite as quickly as this. Six months ago around one-fifth to one-tenth of enquiries from potential customers related to cloud computing; now it is roughly nine out of ten.” He also stated that the attitude of firms’ IT departments has changed. “Whereas once they were reluctant to cede control of new projects, now they look to outsource to the cloud from the word go. We are witnessing a paradigm shift away from traditional on-premise models to the cloud”.http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1636886
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Peeling Onions in the Cloud

From a conceptual standpoint, consumability through abstraction is arguably one of the most important benefits of cloud computing. The cloud offers up some collection of raw resources (i.e., servers, networks, storage, and applications) as a set of pre-configured, pre-integrated, and ready to use services. As a result, users typically need to know a good deal less about how those resources are setup, and can instead concentrate on consuming them to deliver their own set of services.

While the benefits offered by abstraction (namely consumability) are most certainly a good thing, abstraction can also be problematic. What do I mean? Well, while users understand the benefits they get from abstraction, sometimes they need to peel back the layers of the onion. In other words, they need to pop the hood and exercise more control over resource configuration within their cloud. While I expect this need is really news to no one, the implications on the cloud service provider, and subsequently cloud service consumer, are quite interesting to examine.

In order to provide a sense of concreteness around this discussion, I want to share the kind of discussions I have with users on a regular basis. A considerable part of my day job involves working with users implementing a cloud management device that allows them to more rapidly and consistently provision application middleware environments into an on-premise cloud. The fundamental premise of this solution is that of a patterns-based approach to middleware in the cloud. In this sense, a pattern is a representation of a particular application environment. Further, to a deployer, a pattern abstracts the inane details of the integration and configuration of the middleware supporting an application, and instead presents a simple, cloud-deployable unit. Therefore, the patterns are an abstraction of middleware resources delivered in the cloud.
While the patterns-based approach offers up a nice abstraction to the deployer, not everyone in an organization plays the role of deployer. Some within the organization are responsible for building the patterns that represent their desired middleware environments. It should come as no shock that these environments require customizations, and these customizations apply to many different layers in the software stack. Let the peeling begin!

Two Weeks, Two Companies, Two Results: The Tale of SalesForce and Cisco

The stock price of Cisco, a darling of the stock market for a long time, fell 16% and contributed to a 73 point drop in the Dow index on November 11, 2010. SalesForce, on the other hand, shot into the upper atmosphere, up by 18%. Interestingly, Cisco market cap fell by $24 billion, more than the total market cap of SalesForce.

While stock swings are not as common, what made these two companies change their market value so rapidly? Investors usually peer into the future and buy or sell stocks based on the projections. Cloud computing is being recognized by investors as an engine of growth and rewarding certain companies like SalesForce.

Cisco, the sixth largest technology company by market value(1), has some products that are challenged by solutions delivered free or virtually free. One example is the consumer facing umi telepresence compared to Skype or Gtalk. Also, the next iPad is rumored to have a camera built in and there is a plethora of smartphones planned or that have with video chat capability. In this example, Cisco is going after a video conferencing market already crowded with cheap solutions. I expect for Cisco to make some good cloud start-up acquisitions to enhance their server product line capabilities in the cloud market.

Google’s Office Trojan Horse

It’s no secret that Google has been eying Microsoft’s lucrative Office application franchise since the release of the premium, supported version of Google Apps a couple years ago.

Taking a page from Apple’s old playbook of using the education market to get a foot in the door, Google has scored some big wins among university and government IT buyers. They claim to have over 10 million students using Google Apps with over 3 million companies making the switch -- undoubtedly most of these are small firms, but a recent win with the State of Wyoming for over 10,000 seats shows Google triumphant in some head-to-head enterprise contests with Microsoft.

Targeting price sensitive individuals and students, who are also less attached to legacy software and used to running their lives online, was a logical opening gambit, but Google is making its next move squarely into the mainstream enterprise market with the beta release this week of their Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office.

The technology, originally acquired from DocVerse, bridges the gap between thick local applications and data, and cloud-based software and storage. Cloud Connect is a plug-in for Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 (sorry, no Mac support yet) that allows editing Office documents within the familiar confines of Word or PowerPoint, while automatically syncing them to Google’s cloud service. An interesting wrinkle is that once in the cloud, the documents inherit Google’s versioning and multi-user editing capabilities, so that several users can simultaneously edit a document, even locally within Office, without stepping on one another’s changes. (The technology is quite amazing -- those of you with a CS bent can read the full details of how they pull this off starting with the challenges, the solution and finally the optimizations).

Of course, Microsoft now has similar capabilities with Office 2010 (and Mac Office 2011) with it’s ability to save to Windows SkyDrive, but Cloud Connect certainly could drive a wedge between Office users who don’t yet have an enterprise collaboration implementation and their Microsoft account rep seeking to sell them on SharePoint of BPOS.

Many could find the hybrid approach coupling Google’s strength in online document sharing and collaboration with the familiar standby of Microsoft’s Office suite the best of both worlds. The risk for Microsoft is that once documents are in Google’s ecosystem, users could find themselves doing more and more of the content creation, editing and sharing online, rendering Office increasingly superfluous.

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Optimizing Performance and Availability in Virtual Infrastructures

Many IT administrators have already learned the hard way that managing the performance and availability of services built on virtualization technologies can be difficult, if not impossible, at times. All too often, early adopters of virtualization have struggled with limited technology features and stability constraints, while learning new ways to effectively manage capacity requirements. Fortunately, some platforms now offer clustering solutions that are mature enough to automate the balancing of workloads across physical resources. When combined with disciplined capacity planning and sound deployment configurations, it is possible to achieve fast, scalable, and highly available IT services using virtualization.

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