Cloud Computing - the next evolution or another dot com?

Balakrishna Narasimhan

Right now "Cloud Computing" inspires more emotional and conflicting responses from IT consumers and providers than any other. Amongst one of the fastest rising search terms on Google, its most often accompanied by the words "what is." Goldman Sachs tells us that "software continues its unstoppable shift from on-premise to on-demand delivery" - while panels of technology visionaries evaluate if it's today's dot com.

Everyone seems to recognize that there's a fundamental shift that's taking place in the industry. However, there's still a lot of confusion about what "cloud computing" actually is and why it's relevant to customers now. Some want a future based on the past, others contend that there must be a clean break. The reason for this confusion is because everyone in the IT industry has recognized that words do matter and will define the paradigms under which they operate. Thus we end up with many trying to redefine "cloud computing" to support their strengths.

Company	What they say	What they really mean
IBM	"Private" clouds offer many of the same benefits as "public" clouds but are managed within the organization. These types of clouds are not burdened by network bandwidth and availability issues or potential security exposures that may be associated with public clouds. Private clouds can offer the provider and user greater control, security and resilience. [More ]	Cloud computing is a better datacenter
HP	Cloud research is focused on delivering an application and computing end-state of Everything-as-a-Service: billions of users, accessing millions of services, through thousands of service providers, over millions of servers, processing exabytes of data, delivered through terabytes of network traffic. [More ]	Cloud computing means more hardware and networking
Oracle	"We’ve redefined ‘cloud computing’ to include everything we currently do. So it has already achieved dominance in the industry. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing." [More ]	Cloud computing is nothing new
SAP	"the integration of on-site and off-site software on the vendor's "loosely coupled, asynchronous" SOA platform" [More	Cloud computing is a better Enterprise SOA
Microsoft	"The future is a combination of local software and Internet services interacting with one another. Software makes services better and services make software better. And by bringing together the best of both worlds, we maximize choice, flexibility and capabilities for our customers. We describe this evolutionary path in our industry as Software + Services." [More ]	Cloud computing is desktop software, enhanced with internet-delivered data and access
Google	"It starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing – they should be in a ‘cloud’ somewhere. And that if you have the right kind of browser or the right kind of access, it doesn’t matter whether you have a PC or a Mac or a mobile phone or a BlackBerry or what have you – or new devices still to be developed – you can get access to the cloud" [More ]	Cloud computing is internet-enabled apps on a massively scaleable platform
Salesforce	"Cloud computing offers almost unlimited computing power and collaboration at a massive scale. With Force.com Platform-as-Service, we are providing the necessary building blocks to make cloud computing real for the enterprise." [More ]	Cloud computing is SaaS + PaaS
Amazon	"cloud computing is that you can have all the resources that you want, could be storage, compute, networking, with an infinite amount of capacity, available to you to use on the internet, the only thing you need to use it is a credit card" [More ]	Cloud computing is raw computing power, storage and networking as a service

It's enough to make anyone's head spin. Let's first look at some of the key elements of cloud computing in terms of the benefits to customers, since that's ultimately where the rubber hits the road, especially in these economic conditions.

1. Focus on the Business Process Layer of the Stack - Stop worrying about provisioning/managing/maintaining hardware, networking and middleware
2. Pay for what you use, scale up and down smoothly - Purchase computing and application (process) capacity in granular increments. Convert capital expenditures to operating expenses - this allows improvements to business processes even in today's capital constrained environment
3. Benefit from multi tenancy - Get the latest features and enhancements without expensive upgrades - build applications that get better over time without incremental effort from you
4. Speed up development time - make agile development a reality with rapid prototyping and iteration (because of #3)
5. Access applications and data from anywhere on any device - make the virtual office a reality
6. Mash together data from different sources to create new business processes - Because cloud platforms are multi-tenant and meant to prevent breakage via upgrades, it is possible to create stable integrations which lead to new categories of business applications, e.g., combine social graph data with lead information or share real-time data with partners - create more flexible and innovative processes

There are three technical enablers that are critical to realize the benefits above:

• Shared infrastructure and middleware on massively scaleable shared infrastructure
• A multi-tenant application platform
• Open, standards-based APIs

Here at Appirio, we are dedicated to helping companies do more with cloud computing. That's why we partner with companies like Salesforce, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, who are truly delivering on the promise of cloud computing . We help our clients steer clear of near-cloud concepts like "private cloud" and "software + service" because we believe they mitigate or eliminate many of the benefits of cloud computing.

Having served over 120 enterprises and having worked with Salesforce and Google on some of their largest accounts (e.g., Japan Post, Avago, Genetech), it is clear to us that a meaningful definition of cloud computing can drive incredible value for customers. In the coming months we look forward to providing more concrete examples of how the cloud can drive real value for large enterprises, even through these turbulent times.

Whose cloud is it anyway? Appirio's takeaways from presenting at TechCrunch's Cloud Computing Roundtable

Ryan Nichols

We were invited to demonstrate our Referral Management Solution at Friday's Cloud Computing Roundtable, put on by TechCrunch. The provocative title of the event was "Whose cloud is it anyway?", and TechCrunch invited a who's who in cloud computing to help resolve the issue.

TechCrunch asked this question ahead of the event : "Are we on the verge of a new set of platform wars that will make the Windows vs. Mac war look like Tiddlywinks? Or will all the different cloud platforms which are emerging create an interwoven fabric of Web applications that draw from each cloud as is convenient?"

Our presentation was meant to illustrate that we firmly believe in a future of connecting the clouds, NOT cloud warfare. The Referral Management Solution we demonstrated happens to draw on the capabilities of 4 different on-demand platforms: We use the workflow and process management of Force.com, the social graph of Facebook, the computing power of Amazon EC2, and the communication and collaboration capabilities of Google Gadgets. Thanks to these platforms, Appirio was able to focus on solving our customer's problems, NOT rebuilding these underlying capabilities. Best of all? Our customers don't need to know where our application runs in order to capture the benefits.

This is definitely a new model of delivering applications. Because we use the platforms of others, much of our solution is invisible. Our users think they are using Salesforce and Facebook, not "Appirio." This naturally brings up the type of questions we got from the judges on Friday: in essence, do you need to own a platform in order to build an interesting business on the cloud? Our view? Of course not. Interesting companies result from solving important problems. If you don't have to start from scratch, even better.

The roundtable discussion afterwards illustrated how much cloud computing has already changed the business of writing applications. Our favorite (paraphrased) quotes from the round table illustrating this point:

• Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering at Google, on the idea of cloud warfare: ""Paradigms of the past skew our vision of the present-- that's what's going on here. Maybe 10-15 years ago, the platform you were on influenced the applications you could run. Platform lock-in really mattered. The Internet has changed that. Through the web, we've created a platform that's open enough that you can just expect these apps to work together."
  
• Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, on the question of whether startups should use cloud platforms: "Markets are moving so much faster today. If you make the decision to use the old paradigm, not only are you spending a lot more money, you just can't compete."
• Paul Buchheit, Co-founder of FriendFeed and creator of Gmail, on the power of bringing together multiple cloud platforms: "The Internet is a single computer. When working with one machine, I no longer need to worry 'where is my data'-- end-users don't need to care"
  
• Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP of Windows Azure, laying out a surprising perspective on the future of cloud platforms: "I think you'll see a new set of platforms come in, each will be open and inter-operable."
• Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon: "The real value comes from aggregation of these resources...this will enable a whole new generation of applications that could never be built before."
  
• Lew Tucker, CTO of Cloud Computing at Sun Microsystems, on whether interesting businesses can be built on the cloud platforms of others: "The next Google is going to be built on the cloud. If you were starting today, you'd start directly on the cloud."
  

The consensus from the roundtable on these points was so strong, that the topic of "platform warfare" was almost taken off the table. It took Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, to remind us of the reality at most companies today. "The real platform war is still against the old paradigm," he reminded us. "The masses out there don't know that they don't need to buy software and hardware anymore."

Even those stalwarts of the old world, SAP and Oracle are starting make more SaaS/PaaS noise . A topic we'll explore further later this week as part of our 2009 predictions series.

You can watch the entire three hours of the event here.

You can also watch it on co-presenter's ooyala's neat player.