Both vendors offer storage, messaging, queuing, and back-end server scalability that can conceivably offer an alternative to buying and managing onsite software and hardware.
Amazingly enough, access to Google App Engine will be offered for free, versus Amazon’s incremental pricing plans. However, Amazon’s services are priced so low that free versus a couple of hundred dollars per month may not be an issue for enterprises. (Individual consumers, however, will more likely be drawn to the no-cost Google model.)
However, what may be an issue for enterprises are things such as governance, security, privacy, and control — all issues that cloud the Cloud computing space.
In an online poll I am conducting with the post, sentiments are running against Cloud computing for the enterprise: at the time of this writing, 62% said Cloud computing is still too risky of a bet for enterprises, versus 32% saying it is enterprise-capable.
Readers of this blogsite may have already seen my arguments in favor of moving to the Cloud — not having to deal with software maintenance and upgrades, and paying for only what you need. However, there are arguments against enterprise-scale Cloud computing, which include the following:
Cloud computing may create a dependence on the provider (Google, Amazon) and may make it difficult to move to another platform.
Google itself admits that Google App Engine is targeted at consumer applications, not businesses.
Enterprises leveraging Cloud computing may become homogenized — and lose the competitive advantage that may come from custom-built systems.
There’s always the risk that the Cloud provider may change business models or even go out of business.
This is probably a good list to have, since many vendors will try to sell you the concept simply because it’s the latest and greatest hot buzzword. Simplicity is the watchword for cloud computing; anything that suggests different may still be traditional-load-and-fight-with-the-software computing.
Here are just some of James’ “Ways to Tell Its Not Cloud Computing:”
1) “If you need to send a 40 page requirements document to the vendor then… it is not a cloud.”
2) “If you can’t buy it on your personal credit card… it is not a cloud.”
3) “If they are trying to sell you hardware… its not a cloud.”
4) “If there is no API [application programming interface]… its not a cloud.”
5) “If it takes more than ten minutes to provision… its not a cloud.”
6) “If you can’t deprovision in less than ten minutes… its not a cloud.”
7) “If you know where the machines are… its not a cloud.
“If there is a consultant in the room… its not a cloud.”
9) “If you need to install software to use it… its not a cloud.”
There have been plenty of new developments on the cloud computing front. HP has just announced it is delivering a range of virtualization and cloud-computing capabilities it brands as “Next Generation DataCenter (NGDC).” The computer giant said that it would be opening its data centers for customers to use on an incremental basis.
Cloud computing is truly this year’s rising star. Nick Carr also talks about the rise of cloud computing in this new article in Ad Age. Nick says it so well when he speaks about the paradigm shift that has taken place in personal computing:
“In a closet in a spare bedroom of my house is a crate of PC-software programs on CD-ROMs and DVDs. There are dozens of them neatly wedged into their plastic cases — financial programs, graphics programs, encyclopedias, games, business applications and hobby applications. And they all seem, suddenly, like strange artifacts from the past.”
Most of the value of PCs and laptops, Nick says, “comes not from what’s inside them but from the network they’re hooked up to. They’ve become, essentially, terminals.”
Such is also the case with enterprise computing. This vision, in fact, has been bandied about for the past decade, in fact, by enterprise systems vendors such as IBM and Sun Microsystems. Back at the turn of the century, Sun’s Scott McNealy talked about delivering compute capacity via a “Big Freakin’ Webtone Switch.” IBM has long talked about opening up pools of its vast reservoirs of in-house systems to customers.
HP’s new “Adaptive Infrastructure as a Service” (AIaaS) offers customers access to HP-owned and managed data centers that deliver applications such as Exchange and SAP, as well as “other critical business applications.”
On a practical level, cloud computing makes it possible for enterprises to break out of the cycle of paying more and more for the costs and headaches of building and maintaining their own data centers. As a result, organizations need not be anchored as tightly to the expensive investments made in systems, and therefore able to change faster and more flexibly. And no one will miss the long weekends required to perform upgrades.
Is there a down side to such rosy scenarios? Enterprises must weigh the costs of paying eternal monthly access and licensing fees versus one-time purchases for licenses. Plus, there are the risks inherent in relying on an outside partner for computing –a loss of control. Data security also rears its head, and needs to be explored further.
But, for now at least, the future of cloud computing appears to be anything but cloudy.
In a recent keynote at SXSW, Charlene Li of Forrester Research predicted that social networking platforms will be "like air" … "They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be."
More specifically, she broke down the use of such platforms into four components of utility and impact:
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Profiles - universal identities
Relationships - a single social graph
Activities - a social context for activities
Business Models - social influence as a key definer of marketing value
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Here’s an item from the NY Times about recent speculation that Yahoo may join OpenSocial, the Google-led social networking alliance that aims to bring significant degrees of openness to social networking platforms, thus (eventually) stimulating and enhancing ubiquity and pervasive use.
Yahoo intends to join OpenSocial, a Google-led alliance that is developing a common set of standards so developers can create programs that run on many social networks and other Web sites, according to a person with direct knowledge of Yahoo’s plans.
Yahoo’s backing, which could be announced as early as this week, would bring a large base of users to the OpenSocial alliance, which is seen as a counterweight to Facebook’s successful courtship of application developers. The alliance, which was announced in the fall, already includes MySpace, Bebo and several other social networking sites.
Yahoo’s participation “would mean that the site with the largest group of users, and with the largest base of registered users, would be joining OpenSocial,” said Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research.
When asked about Yahoo’s OpenSocial plans, a company spokeswoman said: “Yahoo has a rich history of supporting open standards, such as OpenID and Apache Hadoop, as we believe industry collaboration is beneficial to the developer community and the Web as a whole. While we are evaluating OpenSocial as an emerging standard, we do not comment on speculation or rumors.”
Yahoo has said it wants to speed up efforts to open its site to outside developers. Although it is not a social network, Yahoo could benefit from third party “social” applications that allow users to share, say, their favorite photos, music or movies with their friends.
I think that much of what is written here at the FASTForward blog by my colleagues also supports the distinct probability that the foundation is being created for the step-by-step (depending upon take-up and implementation) of collaboration and social computing platforms, tools and services which will redefine the dynamics of knowledge work and tie, tightly, into Charlene Li’s four key components of social networking platforms.
I have a sister-in-law who just turned 50 who has been until recently remarkably (and determinedly) resistant to online activities. She has basically not ever used the Internet for anything but email, and even that sparingly. Part of her reluctance and resistance is lack of familiarity (beginner’s embarrassment) and the other equally strong aspect has been her clear sense of how online can encroach on or steal time from what many will call "real life".
That there are forms of emergent social isolation and alienation, and addictive behaviours, that have developed as the online world has grwon and spread is irrefutable … just as the number(s) and types (s) of connections and interactions have multiplied and led to interesting behaviours and outcomes.
Back to my sister in law. She is also a very good cook (let’s say amateur gourmet chef) and a talented amateur photographer. As she has grown in her capabilities with a digital camera, she has also gotten more familiar with online environments. Bit by bit, her attitude has been changing. Recently she discovered StumbleUpon, and has almost become an evangelist, taking time out from conversations to show people who visit the interesting things that one can stumble upon just by clicking once. It was also interesting to see her and her girlfriends’ initial reaction to finding people they knew on Facebook.
Slowly and surely, more and more people will use services and tools on the Internet as it weaves its way into and throughout our lives. And as that happens, people will notice more and more the smooth sides and sharp edges of ways this spreading and weaving will impact the ways we live and work .. as will whatever the Cloud becomes.
"2008 is the year that sees Microsoft’s ambitions challenged" is a line halfway through the movie posted below. Eerily prescient, no?
What also seems certain is that even if Microsoft does not acquire Yahoo !, other acquisitions and mergers (and the concomitant convergence and integration) are sure to happen over the next decade
Maybe EPIC 2015 (originally released as EPIC 2014 in 2004 by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson) does not seem so weird or impossible today ?
The “Cloud” has been a buzzword I’ve heard at conferences for many years now, usually referring to anything made available or transported via the public Internet. As of late, with the rise of SaaS, the term “Cloud Computing” has come into vogue, which suggests that data, as well as processing power itself, can be drawn from sources across the Internet. But it always was kind of an informal buzzphrase, along with “elevator speech” and “drinking the Kool-Aid.”
So it’s interesting to see that IBM has just opened a data center in China, officially called the “China Cloud Computing Center,” to be situated in a new industrial park inhabited by emerging software companies. The CCCC will provide each software company in the park with its own virtualized computing resource.
IBM first launched its “Blue Cloud” cloud computing initiative back in November. Perhaps not coincidentally, this announcement was also made in China. Do the Chinese seem to be getting this concept a little better than the rest of the world?
This new CRC report reveals the major drivers of user-led innovation and explores how it is affecting organisations’ relationships with key stakeholders.
It investigates how user-led practices generate business and social value through a major case study of the virtual world Second Life. The report canvasses a number of pathways for organisations to leverage the participation of their audiences, customers and citizens in the interest of co-creating new products, services and platforms.
The research draws on extensive interviews with some of the world’s leading thinkers on the social, economic and legal aspects of user-led innovation including: Eric von Hippel (MIT), Yochai Benkler (Harvard), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Siva Vaidhyanathan (Virginia), John Howkins (Adelphi Charter), Michel Bauwens (P2P Alternatives) and Mitch Kapor (Linden Lab).
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The people interviewed, as cited, are certainly amongst those that are seen to carry significant authority in this Internet era. The same can be said of the Aspen Institute Roundtable participants, who included John Seeley Brown , Joi Ito, John Hagel (featured speaker at the upcoming FASTForward08 conference), Tom Malone of MIT, and other clearly credible folks.
At the risk of being seen to be involved in repeated and shameless self-promotion (I tagged this on to the previous post as well), I’d like to tag onto this emerging activity the working definition of wirearchy from a couple or so years ago. I promise I’ll stop soon
"a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology"
It may be that the serious jargon of the term "collective intelligence" will put some (or many) off, but increasingly it seems to be becoming clear that the interactive social construction of knowledge put to use in response to constantly dynamic markets is demanding some new business logic, new points of friction with which to fashion transaction and new ways of designing and managing the work that leads to the creation of economic value.
Most forwarding-thinking businesses are starting to realize that they need to come to terms with the open Internet environment. This means making some radical changes in how they think about markets, how they structure their own enterprises and how they treat customers.
[ Snip … ]
On the Internet, people have acquired considerable powers of their own. They have developed their own sustainable micro-cultures. They can create their own commons to carry on conversations among peers and develop new forms of reliable “collective intelligence.”
This bottom-up knowledge empowers ordinary individuals to approach market transactions on a more equal footing with sellers, who have historically had greater market power and knowledge. The commoners are able to capture more of the knowledge they create, and use it to their own advantage. Indeed, the commons can be regarded as a source of cutting-edge R&D for companies, as MIT professor Eric von Hippel has shown in his book, Democratizing Innovation.
The phrase that the conference used to describe this phenomenon is “decentralized co-creation of value.” It means that the market is not the sole source of value-creation; dispersed online communities are now sources of value that businesses must collaborate with in order to generate value.
The commons stands on a more equal footing with the market. Instead of all “value” coming from centralized players like corporations, increasingly, value is coming from the “ends” of the Internet – the periphery, where new ideas and innovations first materialize. Value comes from individuals, and groups of individuals, operating in the free space of the commons, where overhead is low to nonexistent, and creativity is not regimented to service prearranged market niches. Thanks to the Internet, social niches are becoming “staging areas” for viable niche markets, a phenomenon also known as the “Long Tail.”
All of these developments create a real crunch for traditional large corporations because large companies like to have extreme control. That’s how they deliver predictable results to investors and protect their brand reputation. But on the Internet, control and predictability are not viable strategies. In fact, they are counter-productive.
Value is generated by having less control. Customers won’t trust a company that tries to use digital rights management or bullying tactics to assert too much control. In a sense, companies are not just competing against other companies, but against the freedoms of the commons.
The challenge for businesses, then, is to develop new sorts of “open business” models that can respect the social dynamics of the Internet, while still monetizing certain forms of value (e.g., selling advertising to the Web users who like your site). Companies have to realize that brands are forms of socially created value; brands are not simply the result of advertising and image campaigns. Online communities create and promote a brand every bit as much as mass media.
One of the most fascinating parts of the report is about the next generation of computing, often known as “The Cloud.” Bill Coleman, the entrepreneur who started BEA Systems and recently started the Cassatt Corporation, describes the Cloud as the convergence of voice, data and video in a networked system that also combines computing, telecommunications and the Internet. You plug your computing appliance into The Cloud – and all your data and stuff is “there,” not on your personal computer.
Everyone at the conference agreed that the current trends in economics and technology will make The Cloud inevitable. Software and hardware will become commodity products, computing will become a service provided by very large utilities, and a handful of these Cloud providers will eventually put the telephone service industry, the cable industry and Internet service providers out of business.
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I have been for some time been calling the emergent organizing principle that I believe underpins the necessary new business logic and models, derived from social-interaction-driven market niches, "wirearchy" - a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.
I am heartened this report has come out (emerged, let’s say) from a group of bright and aware people at the Aspen Institute. I suspect that it makes those of us who feel something big and different is going on bit by byte, link by link … a bit less iconoclastic.
“Wired: When does the big switch from the desktop to the data cloud happen?
Carr: Most people are already there. Young people in particular spend way more time using so-called cloud apps - MySpace, Flickr, Gmail - than running old-fashioned programs on their hard drives. What’s amazing is that this shift from private to public software has happened without us even noticing it …”
‘Private’ versus ‘public’ software — that’s a really good way to describe the differences between Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 applications versus traditional applications.
On Microsoft’s response to cloud computing:
ZDNet’s David Berlind spoke with Microsoft product manager Kirk Gregersen, who said that Microsoft’s release of Office Live Workspace “really just views OLW as a collaborative infrastructure that’s designed to give users a better way to collaborate on documents than many do now with e-mail and/or USB keys.”
But as David puts it: “Much the same way Google is barely willing to admit that Google Apps is designed to compete with Microsoft Office, Microsoft seems barely willing to admit that Office Live Workspace is a response to the pressure that its Web competitors are bringing to bear.”
Google, Webex, and Zoho have to have Microsoft sweating a bit. We’re talking about a huge paradigm change happening right before our eyes, from private to public software. This means on-site bloatware may be slowly working its way to the ash heap of history.
Run an entire enterprise — including sophisticated IT — from the cloud? Just a couple of weeks again, I posted Ismael Ghalimi’s list of all the Office 2.0 tools and technologies you could ever need to avoid bloatware of any kind and run your business entirely from services delivered over the network. Ismael cited Dabble DB as an example of a cloud database that can provide such functionality.
Since that posting, Amazon Web Services announced a “limited beta” of a new service called SimpleDB.
SimpleDB, Amazon says, is a Web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provide the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.
Amazon charges for SimpleDB services on a per-use basis, which initially is priced at 14 cents per machine-hour consumed. Data transfer rates range from 10 cents per gigabyte for data transferred to the database to 13-18 cents per gigabyte for outgoing data. Structured data storage is $1.50 per gigabyte a month.
Cloud computing has interesting implications for enterprises in the long run. Already, cloud computing appears to be leveling the playing field for many start-ups, helping to basically avoid the necessity of any enterprise IT investment at all.
For example, online podcasting service GigaVox Media, an Amazon Web Services customer, reportedly spent just over $80 in its first two months of business on storage, messaging and processing. (I went into some detail about this case and cloud computing over at my ZDNet blog.)
GigaVox uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to store files from podcasts, videocasts, and advertising images. The alternative would have been to buy disks and storage arrays to provide back-up storage, which typically range in price between $2,500 to $20,000 for network-attached storage units. GigaVox would also have had to invest in switches and hubs, as well as the expertise to put it all together and manage on an ongoing basis.
The company then adopted Amazon EC2 to fulfill its transcoding and automated show-assembly needs, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to serve as the glue between these services monitoring EC2 server instances, queuing transcoding requests, and issuing instructions for program processing. As Doug Kaye, co-founder and CTO of GigaVox, put it in a Webcast:
“Even if we could have done this with a cluster of outsourced managed servers, which still wouldn’t have been as scalable, we would have spent tens of thousands of dollars more,” said Kaye. “We didn’t have to buy a single server. We didn’t have to spend any time in a ‘cage.’”
Cloud computing services such as SimpleDB are more likely to catch on among smaller companies and startups. However, Oracle and Microsoft have little to fear at this point among enterprise customers suddenly dropping their onsite databases installations in favor of cloud databases. In fact, open source databases such as MySQL may suffer the most.
Along with small businesses, the cloud databases will most likely start to catch hold among individuals or departments within organizations that need to pull something together quickly, without the necessary budget machinations. But as with all new paradigms, cloud services may start at the peripheries of enterprises and slowly be absorbed into more and more functions. That’s the route open source is taking now, and Microsoft technologies took in the 1990s.
This site is a companion blog to the FASTforward conference and summit series and is sponsored by FAST. The blog, like the conference series, aims to drive and deepen conversation about how today’s companies can use technology to place users in control of information, and is home to ongoing discussion about the user revolution and Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges. More info here...
FAST invites you to join a hosted conversation between Greg Merkle, Vice President and Creative Director for Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group and Ned May, Director and Lead Analyst, Outsell.
Join us on May 21 at 11 PDT for a webcast featuring Outsell, a leading industry research firm serving publishers and information providers, and Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group. Learn how Dow Jones Factiva has expanded search beyond the traditional search box and results set to bring information liquidity to the intelligent enterprise.
Be sure to catch dozens of great interviews from this year's FASTforward. Among the topics discussed between host Jerry Michalski and the speakers, panelists, attendees, and contributors to this blog: enterprise 2.0, search, the user revolution, the future of content, and much, much more.
FAST recently released a white paper on the business and technology of recommendations. Entitled "Enhancing Content Discovery Through Recommendations Solutions", the white paper is free for those who register. Find out more and download the paper today.
“If there is a consultant in the room… its not a cloud.”
