Seradigm: Knowledge Management

As an independent consultant I’ve always worked hard to be technology agnostic. This means understanding (and to the extent that I can, using) the full range of operating systems, desktop and server software platforms, stacks, and development tools and languages. It also means mixing and mingling with people from different parts of the IT landscape, including free software advocates, Microsoft evangelists, and everyone in between.

I use Linux, Windows and MacOS on a daily basis, and for the last 10 years have been watching with interest the philosophical and commercial battle between opensource and proprietary software. About three years ago however, I started wondering whether the next big battle wouldn’t be between Microsoft and Linux, but rather it would be between Microsoft and Google.

It first started being described as ‘Application Service Providers’, then ‘Software as a Service’, and it finally seems to have settled on ‘Cloud Computing’. ASPs had promise, but in terms of infrastructure and middleware provision seem to have suffered in part from lack of initial scale to get the required cost benefits. SaaS has had some successes, such as Salesforce.com and others.

What’s made me really realise that the space has changed from an idea to a business reality is not the media, the reporting, or the fact that ‘Cloud Computing’ on Google Trends has almost overtaken SaaS. It’s the people, and the business names.

I’m seeing a third set of people emerge, they’re not OpenSource stallwarts, or Microsofties, they’re Cloud junkies. They’re embracing Google Apps, Amazon’s S3 and EC2, and to a lesser extent, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and others. They’re starting businesses in New Zealand with names like Cloudbreak, Waveadept and Memia Cloud Services Architecture. They’re advocating, promoting, and selling Cloud based solutions. They’re starting to address and answer questions about sovereignty of data, privacy, security, disaster recovery, service level agreements and contracts with cloud providers, and total cost of ownership calculations.

In New Zealand we’ve seen these companies helping Auckland University put 50,000 students on Gmail, and NZPost moving 2,100 staff to Google Apps.

I recently went to an event in Wellington hosted by Cloudbreak and Waveadept.  There were a couple of telling quotes from Google staff:

“Is email [provisioning] core to your business, I hope not because if so you’re in competition with me” (and implicitly, you’re going to lose…)

“Microsoft Office is like Photoshop, every business should have a couple of copies”

I don’t agree or disagree with these statements, but they are telling. They signal a potential shift from the way we’ve been using information technology over the last ten years.

Is cloud computing just an obvious next step after the server virtualisation movement we’ve seen in the last five years? Will organisations move everything to the cloud? Or will they maintain a mix of proprietary/opensource solutions hosted behind the corporate firewall, and couple that with some Cloud based services.

There are some obvious benefits to cloud computing:

• Reduction in risk of data loss/security breaches due to people losing their laptops or thumbdrives while travelling
• Cost take out, i.e. switching from a mixed fixed cost (capex) + variable cost (opex), to a purely variable cost model
• It gets rid of the challenges of building out your own overcrowded server rooms/data centres
• Improved functionality rolled out in real time, without having to go through painful upgrade cycles
• Reduced time to value in implementation of new services

There are also some real risks and concerns about:

• Performance and reliability over Internet connections and the (limited) bandwidth we have in & out of NZ
• Sovereignty of data (data sitting under different jurisdictions and laws)
• Control over the data, and restricting others from using it inappropriately
• Risk of the cloud computing provider holding the data going out of business
• The implications for staffing levels in IT departments

The SSC recently released a set of guidelines about Government Use of Offshore Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Service Providers to help agencies make good decisions about venturing into the cloud computing realm.

On the small business front, I have a friend who’s started a niche online business providing parent-teacher interview scheduling services for schools. It’s being adopted at a much faster rate than he’d imagined. Although he has expertise in providing web hosting services himself, he’s now very glad he decided to build it in Google App Engine, as it’ll scale to meet the increasing demand in a ‘pay as you go’ fashion.

While the way it will play out is still a little misty, it’s clear cloud computing is going to have a major impact, and I predict we’ll see a lot more startup companies with cloud based metaphors in their names.

In closing, I’m reminded of the ever prescient Mark Andresson, founder of the Netscape browser. In 1999 he started a company called Loudcloud to provide managed Internet services. It was a bit before its time, but even so evolved into a successful business that HP acquired for $1.6B…

This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 1:13 pm and is filed under cloud computing, egovernment, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.