Home >  Articles >

•  
•  
•  
•  

Computing is going the way of the electrical utility.

Thomas Edison revolutionised the supply of electricity in 19th Century by offering it as a utility over long distances, meaning homes and businesses could give up their private DC generators.

Soon computing will follow suit, with vendors supplying compute resources and software over the internet, as customers require them.

That’s the claim of long-time IT commentator Nicholas Carr, detailed in his book on the subject titled The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.

The scenario has several clear advantages over traditional computing:

1. Customers only pay for what they use.

2. Maintenance is left up to whichever company is providing the software, freeing up the IT department’s time to focus on other projects.

Cloud computing — the delivery of software and IT resources over the internet — is certainly gaining sway with consumers in the form of services like YouTube and Flickr. But opinions are mixed about its power to dominate the corporate IT department.

Perfect IT

Local firm IBRS’s Colin Boswell recently published a paper on the topic. His paper, The Next Perfect IT Storm: The Red Shift, Utility Computing, notes that services that offer on-demand computing resources have been around for years, with little success.

The advent of the web as a delivery method has opened up the way for a new breed of utilities though, including Amazon’s S3 online storage service and its EC2 server farm service.

The paper warns that these services are on their way, and will soon take over, with negative consequences for big hardware and software vendors like Intel and Microsoft.

Boswell’s IBRS compatriot Kevin McIsaac gave Voice&Data.com.au his own spin on the phenomenon. Like Carr, he appeals to history to reveal the ways of the future, but focuses on developments more recent than the advent of utility power.

“We had this wonderful thing called the mainframe back in the ‘70s that everybody used, and then we had other services that were going to replace it. The truth of the matter is: they didn’t,” he says.

After the mainframe, Unix came long; after that, Windows and the PC appeared. But none really replaced the preceding technology. Instead, each became another layer in the cake that is enterprise IT. So, too, will cloud computing, McIsaac believes, with organisations swapping out traditional software for cloud-based services — if there is sufficient business reason.

All companies great and small

Such displacement of computing ‘to the cloud’ will initially be fairly limited, he says, and will occur most obviously in small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), for two reasons:

1. Small organisations are often the ones lacking specific services or pieces of infrastructure.

2. They’re possibly less concerned about integration and security issues that might arise from cloud applications.

Indeed, McIsaac’s firm is a small business itself, and it has known the joys of a little cloud computing.

“Rather than run our own systems and stuff, we've actually hosted that with someone else. We have open source applications that run [in the cloud] for our web, CRM, email and so on. We pay a flat monthly fee for our service, so no one in house actually runs it. We just use it.”

The cloud applications that really take off will be based around collaboration, McIsaac says. These web apps are naturally more suited to sharing data over the internet than in-house software.

Rumours of the following deaths have been greatly exaggerated

Several companies are now offering hosted desktop environments, replete with office applications. Vendors include the Australian BlueFire and the up-and-coming IT on Tap. Users log in remotely and access their ‘desktop’ and associated applications through a web browser.

But this will not spell the death of the desktop.

“Delivering the desktop over the internet is relatively over-hyped,” McIsaac says. “There are some things — particularly file-sharing applications — that make sense to host on the internet.”

“But document processing? Maybe. Maybe not. Applications run fine on the desktop, and the desktop's cheap.”

Don’t be so hasty to drop your IT department, either. After all, someone is going to need to talk to and manage the cloud-computing people. But that doesn’t mean things will stay the same.

“The role of the IT folks will change. There'll be greater automation and simplification of stuff, so IT will be less about dealing with the hardware and much more about dealing with the business functions. IT will be less about nuts and bolts and more about business values,” he says.

Nor will cloud computing spell the death of big hardware vendors like Intel — the cloud computing people will have to buy their hardware somewhere.

The real battle, according to McIsaac, will be between traditional enterprise software vendors, and those offering similar services through the cloud.

The distant future

And while the cloud may not offer the ultimate solution for today’s businesses, McIsaac says the future will entail an integration of in-house technology and cloud computing. Returning to Carr’s analogy, he points out that America’s last DC generator was turned off only very recently.

“In 15 years, it might be that no one has their own hardware anymore,” he admits.

“But these older technologies — ways of delivering and doing stuff — have a habit of hanging around. I would not be surprised to see some or a lot of organisations 20 years from now still running their own servers. And at the same time, getting stuff from the cloud.”

 

• Share this Article:
• digg this
• add to del.icio.us
• StumbleUpon
• RSS Feeds