Survey Finds Cloud Computing Has Matured, But It Can Be a Pain

(Coutesy pcmag.com. Published online June 1, 2011) 

 
A survey conducted by Avanade finds that cloud computing has reached its first milestone as a mature technology.
Out of the 573 C-level executives, business unit leaders, and IT decision-makers surveyed, three key indicators of the maturing of cloud computing were made apparent: businesses have increased investments in resources to secure, manage, and support cloud computing, there is growing adoption and preference for private clouds, and a healthy interest in cloud computing for revenue-generating services.
Some other survey highlights:

74 percent of enterprises are using cloud computing; a 23 percent growth since Avanade's September 2009 survey. Of organizations yet to adopt cloud services, three-quarters say it's in future plans. 

60 percent of companies say cloud computing is a top IT priority for next year. The sentiment is even higher among C-level executives with 75 percent reporting cloud computing as a top priority.

43 percent of companies surveyed use private cloud services.

The United States has seen steady cloud computing adoption rates with a 19 percent increase since a survey conducted in 2009. The highest cloud adoption rates among those surveyed were in Italy, Canada, France, Germany, and Australia, respectively.

The survey also revealed cloud growing pains. One in five executives reports that it's impossible to manage all of the disparate cloud services within their organizations. About 60 percent are worried about unmanaged cloud sprawl.

The concerns about managing cloud services, especially employee access to public cloud services is well-founded. One in five respondents said they have personally purchased a cloud service without the IT department's knowledge. The reasons given were that many thought it takes too long to go through IT and that it's easier to provision cloud services themselves. About 27 percent say their company's cloud policy actually prohibits the cloud services they want to use.
While 60 percent of these companies do have corporate policies in place to prohibit such actions, those surveyed say there is no real deterrent for purchasing cloud services against policy guidelines. 29 percent reported there were no ramifications whatsoever and 48 percent say it is little more than a warning.

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud: Is it the next big thing for humans?

Ubuntu has been around for a while now and has been instrumental in making us mortals understand what Linux is all about. And now with the popularity of cloud computing reaching new heights, Canonical has now also officially deemed Ubuntu as “the cloud OS.” What needs to be seen is whether this is what actually "matters" to those who ultimately "matter" for Ubuntu? This is also important when we remember that Canonical’s been pushing Ubuntu’s cloud-centric features hard in recent months.  Recently, Canonical  released Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) on Dell servers, official support for the OpenStack cloud management infrastructure and the introduction by Autonomic Resources of a UEC-based product for federal agencies in the United States. So, a lot has been happening on cloud computing front from Ubuntu side.

First and foremost these developments highlight the growing confidence that stakeholders have in Ubuntu's ability to generate revenue and its future role as a vehicle of economic change in the market. Even as Ubuntu’s most dynamic source of popularity remains the desktop, where the distribution enjoys unparalleled popularity among users and on which Canonical continues to push innovations like the Unity interface, the actual sustainability of Ubuntu Linux is being increasingly seen as rooted in the server room and, especially, the cloud. The focus is now shifting where the marketing strategy focuses on Ubuntu Server Edition as an entity that provides the base on which custom-built, self-hosted cloud environments are forged.  It means, in future, we are going to see more and more Ubuntu as infrastructure vendor for small, medium and start up cloud businesses worldwide in active support of Hardware providers such as DELL.

This makes Ubuntu perhaps the first concrete mainstream entity in the cloud computing domain with a level of clarity that the cloud totally lacked previously. So far, all that we have seen is a very ambiguous sketch of potential applications and benefits that emerge out of cloud environment and it all sounds very fascinating. But as one blogger has very aptly pointed out "it’s another thing to enunciate a clear conception of what the cloud actually means in practice, and how it can be useful for businesses beyond the relative confines of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)".

So, appreciation is all the more due for Canonical for being the first enterprise to take cloud computing seriously. They now have the tools developed and strategies prepared to move ahead in the previously uncharted waters and provide users with an opportunity to take advantage of the cloud in a smooth and understandable manner.

Ultimately, it is going to be the users who will decide upon the fate of this initiative. And it still is to be seen how far Ubuntu can go to meet its stated goals and honor its desired objectives. The market, however, now has a quantifiable benchmark to test the viability of cloud computing. And in my assessment, cloud computing is definitely the next level to go so very soon, we should expect several other competitors rushing in to fill the void. With the rise of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, we may see a day when in the words of a chief strategist at Canonical . That day may not be far but for now, even with this initiative, the world of cloud computing is still very young and needs to be nurtured very carefully.

Ray Ozzie Chief Software Architect departs from Microsoft

The departure of Ray Ozzie was long anticipated. The timing is curious enough for me though...He is a software engineer of great talent and foresight. Before joining Microsoft, Ray has two notable products to his credit. One, Lotus Notes which was purchased by IBM somewhere around 1995. It has a lot of following even now yet its true potential was never realized. Second was Groove, which was purchased by Microsoft along with Ray himself. Groove was later assimilated in MS Sharepoint technology which was released to users of later versions of MS Office (such as office 2007). Ray has been with microsoft since 2005.

Are they gonna miss you?

Yet, interesting for me is the way, Ozzie is being hotly debated in the technology circles. He has a fair share of devotees and hostiles amongs the community so it is not uncommon to see swords being drawn in favor or against him. For me his departure from microsoft presents two gloomy scenarios for future:
1. Ray Ozzie has been a great proponent of cloud computing and has been predicting the ultimate rise of cloud computing for a very long time. In fact Sharepoint always had a strong group of people in Microsoft devoted fanatically to the idea of cloud computing. As a consequence, Microsoft under his vision has delivered a fairly impressive portfolio of cloud-based offerings. On the consumer side, Microsoft now has a full range of Windows Live services, and it’s done an impressive job of moving Exchange and SharePoint to hosted services that aren’t just for enterprises anymore. Yet, all these achievements cant gloss over the stark failure that Ray had due to his lack of vision. And today, with his departure, the future of cloud based applications from Microsoft is also in doubt.
2. The knowledge of software architecture and its relevance has also been thrown into question. With the emergent phenomenon of end user programming and cloud, the question has been present there for a very long time whether, organizations need actual software architects anymore? Today more and more services are lacking any integral underlying architecture and instead are becoming more and more capable of evolving themselves according to user's demands.With the departure of Ray from Microsoft and no replacement being announced in his seat, it seems like Microsoft has answered in affirmative regarding software architecture becoming gradually obsolete. A sad tale of affairs indeed.

How Microsoft is positioning itself in the age of cloud computing

How Microsoft is viewing things in 2014

 They say a picture is worth a thousand words and this picture meant much more to me than that. Quite simply: Global IT spending in 2014 will be a whopping 2.5 trillion. The traditional IT market share in this mammoth amphibious will be just 400 billion. Microsoft is gearing up to tap this market through cloud computing tools such as AZURE. So the question for us in Pakistan is very simple.....are we gonna let another train miss our station?????

Computing Arbitrage: The new horizon of business models for cloud computing

Murky clouds, murkier computing

This is my first post related to a research area that I am pursuing quite vigorously these days. It has to do with cloud computing. Cloud computing has come along way now and has established itself as an active area of research. So the next big thing to happen for cloud computing must be cloud centric business models. Let’s have a look at some of the cloud computing business models that are likely to go mainstream in coming years. I spent some time thinking about it and here is the first cloud specific business model:

Computing arbitrage: One of the most innovative and impressive business models that I have studied so far. Putting in a nutshell, companies will buy bandwidth at wholesale arte and resell it to other companies for their specific needs. For example, Peekfon solved the problem of expensive roaming for the consumers in Eurpoe by buying data bandwidth in bulk and slice-it-and-dice-it to sell it to the customers. A truly classic market oriented model involving price negotiations, marketing and packaging requirements. Another aspect is the use of data compression for the purpose of bandwidth optimization.

When talking of cloud computing business models, we have to make sure that a balanced tradeoff exists between users needs for elastic computing as well as their demands for an assured fixed long term service delivery. So the need for computing arbitrage becomes quite clear. However, we can’t ignore another aspect of this whole scene. As the requirements of cloud users become more and more defined, the number of companies providing cloud services keeping a balanced tradeoff will keep on getting smaller and smaller as immature and inexperienced players will be pruned out. The danger I am visualizing is that we may be heading towards a sequel of “dot com” boom and bust. The scenario though quite far fetched now is not too unrealistic as well. All of this however, augurs well for companies that currently have a portfolio of cloud management tools or are "cloud SI".