| 9 April 2009:Keep your head out of the clouds |
In this issueCloud computing Cloud computingI just received a white paper from Salesforce.com entitled "5 reasons why CIOs are adopting cloud computing in 2009. No kidding - that was the title. You can find the white paper here. This is a pretty impressive claim. What is behind it? If you check out the video here, you will find dozens of experts asked what it is. And you get dozens of different answers (including 'when I use my laptop on a plane'). However Cloud Computing generally means that instead of running your application on your computer, you run it on someone else's computer and access it via a web browser. The term comes from the ubiquitous use of a cloud to represent the Internet on powerpoint presentations. The big idea is that instead of buying your application from a software house, you run it from the Internet and pay for it when you need it. Last year this approach was called Software as a Service (SaaS). However that was very 2008; these days you refer to Cloud Computing. Note: some pedant is going to tell you that SaaS is different from Cloud Computing, which is different from Platform as a Service (PaaS) which is different from On Demand. Guys - this is marketing. The words can mean what we want them to mean; and now the jargon du jour is Cloud Computing. Like 'Web 2.0' it is being used for everything. Cloud computing 1970's styleRunning an application remotely over a network is of itself not a very new concept. In 1980 I produced the Logica Inc budget using a teletype machine connected via a dial-up line to an ADP computer somewhere in the cloud that was the ADP network. I paid by the hour and all the budget runs cost about $3,000 in total. The following year I found I could save a lot of money and get a quicker result by running a brand new spreadsheet program called Visicalc on a $2,000 Apple II computer. Thus began the decline of cloud computing; 1970's style. Cloud computing 2000's styleRoll forward a couple of decades and networks have got a great deal faster and cheaper. The economics are different, and cloud computing is looking a good alternative to supporting individual PC applications or even your own mainframe. Can you search on Google, find an application, register, and be up and running with your new billing system the same day? These are the people you might come across (and no you won't): Force.comSalesforce.com provides the market-leading contact management service. This is now called either sales force automation (SFA) or customer relationship management (CRM) depending on whether you are dealing with prospective or existing customers. The salesforce software is provided on their own mainframes and is accessed via a browser. They charge per month per user. In some industries, such as financial technology, salesforce.com is ubiquitous. In fact they have such a high market penetration that to grow further they have to diversify. Their chosen route is to create a website (www.force.com) where other people can offer their applications to run on their platform. They call it the AppExchange. There are over 800 applications listed, the vast majority of which seem to be add-ons to the salesforce.com system. This is however obviously a very interesting concept and other non-salesforce applications are being added. NetsuiteNetsuite is a complete CRM, SFA, Accounting, ERP (enterprise resource planning) and ecommerce system provided as software as a service. Actually they don't call it Cloud Computing, instead they have a 'Cloud' offering which consists of other peoples add-ons - a bit like the AppExchange concept. For a startup ecommerce operation by the way, Netsuite is almost a no-brainer. The cost savings and benefits from a totally integrated system are huge. (Please, please talk to us first if you are interested as we have a very good Netsuite partner to recommend. If you pick up the phone and talk to them direct, it is much harder for my partner to help you. Don't ask.) Google have a suite of office applications that run 'in the cloud'. Personally I can't see a good reason to use these unless you have a special need to share the documents with others. AmazonAmazon has a Cloud offering which looks to me like a rather expensive virtual private server (VPS). This is a login to a Unix or Windows computer that looks and feels as if you have the computer all to yourself. Physically you are sharing the computer with many others but this is all hidden from you. The idea is that you pay by the hour while your server is 'In Use'. However as far as I can see an idle web server is treated as 'In Use'. The only way to not be 'In Use' appears to be to close it down. The trick here however is that when you create a server you can specify that it is to be preloaded with software from a library. This is what makes it 'Cloud Computing' rather than just any old VPS such as I might offer you for somewhat less cost. Hosting providersIf Amazon can market a VPS offering as Cloud Computing, then the door is opened for many others to do the same - but without the preloaded software bit. You might see this as 'Cloud Hosting' instead. Back to cloud computing and developing five times faster.If you read the white paper from Salesforce.com, you will discover the undoubted advantages of running a pre-written set of software, over developing those same applications from scratch. Not exactly revolutionary, and I would say that the '5 times' is an under-estimate. I guess no-one would have believed 50 times. How about cheaper.I think this is where TCO comes in. If you are a big corporation, with lots of centralised resources, you will probably not save much by outsourcing your IT in this way. However for medium sized businesses, a 'few pounds per seat per month' SFA solution from salesforce.com probably does save you quite a bit of money over an in-house solution. Little plugIn a very similar way, a small to medium sized design agency would be better off going to a specialist for their web technology (like us) rather than trying to develop it in-house. We take away the development and support issues because we provide content management and ecommerce as a Cloud solution. Mind you, we called it something different last year. From my blogNetbook operating systems - the top five.I see Robert Dyas has a windows netbook for less than £150. The catch - it is running Windows CE, the operating system aimed at mobile applications and very much not Vista. So here are the main candidates for your netbook next year:
News from the webMicrosoft released Internet Explorer 8 last month. I am using it and it seems fine. It has some nice features and is more standards compliant. The average punter will probably not notice much difference. Talking about Cloud Computing; Google docs had a security hole that exposed documents which should have been private. As predicted Google is planning to be much smarter about how they target ads, using keywords plus their knowledge of the sites visited by that user. They will also use the user's own preferences. So if you are searching for cooking information, but get ads for running shoes it is because you just visited the Nike site. You can opt out of this, but the opt-out is implemented by setting a cookie. People paranoid about this sort of thing tend to clear out cookies from time to time, and when they do this the opt-out goes. To get around this problem Google offers a plug-in. Of course if you see cookies as part of some dark plot, what do you think of plug-ins! No doubt about it. Google is out to get you. Google is also getting smarter in returning search results. It is basing results not just on the keywords but also the meaning of the keywords. It also uses the location of the searcher to bias results (try searching on 'restaurant'). Mobile web use more than doubled last year in the US. Dell is looking at "smaller mobile Internet devices" but no-one really knows what it means. Will they buy Palm? Will they produce a phone/netbook device? We should be told. Some screenshots of the iPhone 3.0 have leaked out.
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