Software on Demand
On February 24, 2007, the day the term “cloud computing” was coined. Why is it important for consumers, business owners in the SMB and large sector and what are the key points you need to know about it?
According to Merrill Lynch: Cloud Computing Market Will Reach $160 Billion by 2011 … “The estimate includes $95 billion in business and productivity applications and the remaining $65 billion to be spent on online advertising”. Where it is 100B or 150B, it is am massive business considering an Adobe, a giant in the software industry has a Market Cap of 18B.
Even U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration is keen on cloud computing. We all need to cut costs and as we all know, good hardware is not cheap and does become out of date by the time you have it up and running. Then you need to make sure the software and its licence costs are accessible for use by your staff and fully functional.
The way to manage all of this in a scalable, cost effective way whilst having access to cutting edge hardware and software is here. We all use it and yet most of us don’t even realize it: Cloud Computing
For some of us in business we have come across www.salesforce.com which has 78% of the CRM on demand market. How about email clients like gmail, yahoo mail and so on. If you use any of those services, well those are stored, managed and available for your convenience in the Cloud. Think about it, your email, contact list and calendar don’t live in your hard-drive or mobile phone. They are accessed using the web. Since you or I don’t know where that server is, we can safely wave our hands and point to the Cloud.
Many professional refer to the suite of services stored, managed and delivered in the Cloud as SaaS or Software as a Service. I prefer to call it, SaD: Software on Demand … which feels right as it usually 24/7 and in this case can be accessed when and where I choose.
When it comes to IT Professionals, not having to deal with buying expensive hardware and stacking them high on endless rows of racks can be a godsend. It simply allows IT professionals to work ON the business more than IN the business of racking and stacking server farms. Plus they can access latest software updates seamlessly.
There are so many benefits to SaD, one of which has to do with my favorite subject matter: Livcing in a Sustainable Eco Friendly and Progressive Environment. Yes instead of a battery of machines sitting in your Server farms which at times is used to 65% capacity and other time 10% capacity it is a case where the cooling costs, depreciation of the equipment and so on are not at all cost efficient.
The Environments wins if we are to use our IT expenditure on a user pay basis leveraging off of SaD. Accessing the collective of Servers in the cloud is cost effective, fast and eco-friendly plus adds ot your EBITS and puts a smile on your shareholder’s face. Think of car-pooling where one car moves several people for a tiny fraction more energy.
Clear Benefits: Data Storage capability, scalability, retrieval, mining and securing is now increasing thanks to Virtualization. Lets look at each one of those capabilities in my upcoming Blogs and where the issues might be. As much as the advantages are clearly ahead, as a Business Professional you may want to summarize them and look at what does that really mean for your business.
Issues to Clarify: Pondering that question, I came up with a few questions of my own: Internet Bandwidth, Choice of Cloud Service Providers, is my Data truly portable and if so how easy is it? Each area
Should IT thought leaders consider partial virtualization as a interim step as the world ‘s internet network infrastructure gets more intertwined and robust in the future? What are companies like Cisco and Sun Micro doing about it? Should we perhaps consider a Hybrid Model of part Office based Servers and Part SaD with some less expensive third party applications in some way Cached or stored on your own Servers? In emerging markets in Asia for instance there are issues accessing seamless internet access.
A William Blair & Co. report on the data storage sector says that … “data created by consumers and businesses doubles every 18 months, resulting in mid-single digit growth for the $45 billion storage systems and software market”. Sounds like the equivalent of Moore’s Law regards CPU development so if this is right, then Cloud and SaD is here to stay and get bigger every time.
This Post will b e a catalyst to more in depth views on the future of Cloud and how business and personal productivity could escalate if it is used the right way.
