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Blogvent Day 9 – Cloud Nine

Business | Technology

Momentum, expectation and hype about Cloud Computing continue to build. But how many consumers and enterprises really understand what it is, what it will do for them and whether it will live up to the marketing promise? This asks the question how should marketers balance promotion with realistic expectation setting.

Despite the current rush to the latest computing jargon of cloud, the concept of utility computing is not new. In a sense the same idea was offered first by the IBM and others with the mainframe as a centralised concept and then later by Sun and others, in a distributed model in an attempt to combat the increasing influence of Microsoft. Now perhaps the technology and the time are right to more fully deliver on the promise. We have ubiquitous access to the internet and we have well established virtualisation technologies in the data centre as well as on the access device. Perhaps most importantly people are becoming used to the idea that everything doesn’t need to be in house, in either sense of the expression. It can all be on the network, somewhere.

What is covered by everything depends on whether we are talking about consumers or organisations. Consumers have been experimenting with accessing music over the cloud using Spotify or manipulating, storing and sharing their photos using Picasa to highlight just two of the hundreds of other services available over the web for tasks from backup to banking.

Enterprises have possibly been slower to react despite many years of experience in outsourcing processes or entire business functions. Given the protective nature of many IT departments it is perhaps strange that among the best known enterprise implementations and a stock market darling is Salesforce.com, a CRM solution that puts a businesses life blood into the cloud. But momentum is building, with more and more application areas and infrastructures moving to this model. Successful implementations are now winning awards such as CSC’s work in moving 30,000 Royal Mail employees to Microsoft’s BPOS online services.

So the reality, so far, does appear to live up to the hype. The true measure of success will be when we stop talking about and marketing the cloud because we take it for granted that our data and knowledge and processes are sitting out there somewhere and are delivered to us as part of a service.

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