CloudComputing - Takuya Homma on Diigo

28 Jun 09

Kundra: Not only that, they'll also be able to provide feedback on quality. And one of the most important things—and this is where the wired community can help—is to tag the data feeds. Once you tag them, you'll be able to put them in the right context.

Wired: You mean, like tagging photos on Flickr or Google Image Labeler? So if I notice that a feed from the FAA is actually surprisingly helpful to bird-watchers, I could just note that. And then an ornithologist who's not finding what he wants through the National Park Service could see that tag?
Kundra: Well, a lot of stuff keeps me up. There needs to be a balance between privacy and security on the one hand, and ensuring that we have a participatory democracy.
3 more annotations...
- Wired: But if the wrong data falls into the wrong hands ... couldn't some clever hacker in Ukraine use IRS data to empty our bank accounts?
- Wired: As CTO of Washington, you moved tens of thousands of employees from Microsoft Office to Google Apps to save money. Part of your new agenda is shifting the government to cloud computing and using free software. How will that happen?
- Kundra: We've got a committee working on cloud computing, and we're looking at issues like privacy, cookies, and security policies. But it makes no sense to spend billions down the line when we can get these technologies for free.

13 Feb 09

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Another little IBM deal

www.roughtype.com/...another_little.php - Preview

CloudComputing

"If compute clouds want to succeed as businesses instead of toys, they have to run the same commercial software that IT departments deploy internally on their own servers. Which is why [the] deal struck between IBM and Amazon's Web Services subsidiary is important, perhaps more so for Amazon than for Big Blue."

27 Dec 08

Information technology without borders | Clouds and judgment | The Economist

www.economist.com/...displaystory.cfm - Preview

CloudComputing

The danger is less that the cloud will be a Wild West than that it will be peopled by too many sheriffs scrapping over the rules. Some enforcers are already stirring up trouble, threatening employees of online companies in one jurisdiction to get their employers based in another to fork over incriminating data for instance. Several governments have passed new laws forcing online firms to retain more data. At some point, cloud providers may find themselves compelled to build data centres in every country where they do business.
It will not be easy to strike the balance, but at the very least governments can enhance efficiency without threatening their own sovereignty. Countries could sign up to a global minimum standard in areas such as privacy. Law-enforcement agencies from different countries could foster the habit of co-operation. Governments need to be sure that standards are not just an underhand way of keeping the data business within their own borders. Even then, some national differences are bound to endure, so cloud-computing services will have to take place on systems designed to cope. For instance, Microsoft, which is building a global computing platform, is designing a system that can accommodate some regulation, such as keeping data within national borders. The cloud may be global, but the climate will sometimes be local.

A survey of corporate IT: The economics of the cloud | Highs and lows | The Economist

www.economist.com/...displaystory.cfm - Preview

CloudComputing

Yet the biggest challenge for software firms is to become providers of online services themselves, says Brent Thill of Citi Investment Research. So far they have moved slowly, offering SaaS only on the side, if at all. This was partly because their customers were not that keen. But more importantly, notes Mr Thill, the software houses are still wedded to their old business model. With SaaS they do not get a big upfront payment, only subscription fees.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, denies any evil intent to achieve world domination. He argues, with some justice, that it would be hard for Google to control the cloud, if only for technical reasons: much of it is already based on open standards, and its loose structure does not lend itself to locking customers in.
2 more annotations...
- Similarly, Google’s natural instinct is to do its utmost to encourage people to spend more time online, because that will give the company more opportunities to sell advertisements and collect data about them. According to Mr Carr, almost everything the company does—building huge data centres, fighting copyright restrictions, digitising the world’s libraries, developing a new browser and, most recently, even helping to launch satellites—is aimed at increasing the use of the internet. “Google wants information to be free”, he recently wrote in his blog, “because as the cost of information falls it makes more money.”
- But Google may never become as powerful as Microsoft because regulators are unlikely to let it. Microsoft was eventually put in the dock for abusing its monopoly because it got too greedy, pushing most of the rest of the industry to complain. Given that the world has already lived through the Microsoft drama and that Google will affect many more industries, the search company is likely to be restrained much earlier. The firm is currently in negotiations with the US Justice Department about a controversial advertising partnership between itself and one of its competitors, Yahoo!, which would further strengthen Google’s position in online advertising.

A survey of corporate IT: The long nimbus | The Economist

www.economist.com/...displaystory.cfm - Preview

CloudComputing

What effect will all this have on the nature of the firm? If IT systems really allow companies to become more modular and flexible, this should foster further specialisation. It will become even easier to outsource business processes, or at least those parts of them where firms do not enjoy a competitive advantage. Companies will increasingly focus on their “core” and shed the “context”, in the words of Geoffrey Moore, managing director of TCG Advisors, a consultancy.
This also means that companies will rely more on services provided by others. They will increasingly form “process networks”, a term for loosely connected groupings of specialised firms coined by John Hagel, a business strategist at Deloitte & Touche, an auditing firm. His prime example is Li & Fung, a company based in Hong Kong that has assembled a global process network of nearly 10,000 business partners in the clothing industry from which it puts together customised supply chains for clothes designers.
6 more annotations...
- Both trends could mean that in future huge clouds—which might be called “industry operating systems”—will provide basic services for a particular sector, for instance finance or logistics. On top of these systems will sit many specialised and interconnected firms, just like applications on a computing platform. Yet this is only half the story. The cloud changes not only the plumbing and structure of firms and industries, known as the “transactional layer”, but also their “interactional layer”, a term coined by Andy Mulholland, chief technologist of Capgemini, a consultancy. He defines this as the environment where all the interactions between people take place, both within an organisation and with its business partners.
- Consumers have pulled ahead of companies in using cloud-based services that allow for better collaboration, such as blogs, wikis and social networks. The first generation of people that has grown up using all these tools is now entering the workforce. Being used to a culture of sharing information freely, these “digital natives” will be impatient with the rules of traditional corporate IT.
- Companies may not have much choice but to open up, says Mr Mulholland. Employees will increasingly resist constraints on their use of technology, and they will have a growing need to reach beyond the corporate firewall. Twenty years ago, he argues, 80% of the knowledge that workers required to do their jobs resided within their company. Now it is only 20% because the world is changing ever faster. “We need to be open to new and unknown connections with people and content,” he says.
- Yet the impact of the cloud will also be felt on a macroeconomic level. Just as it makes small firms more competitive, it will help developing economies to move ahead. “The biggest promise is that it will make computing cheaper and easier to use—and thus allow it to penetrate new markets,” says Russ Daniels, chief technology officer for HP’s cloud-services strategy.
- The mobile phone has already enabled developing countries to skip fixed-line networks. Cloud computing could prove to be a similar “leapfrog” technology because it dispenses with the need to build a cumbersome IT infrastructure. “Software developers from a developing country can build just as great an application on our platform as somebody who lives in Palo Alto,” says Mr Benioff of Salesforce.
- All this suggests that the economic impact of the cloud may be felt not only in the IT industry itself but in other sectors too. The internet disrupted the music business; Google disrupted the media; cloud-based companies could become disrupters in other inefficient industries. Buzzwords such as “Health Care 2.0”, “Banking 2.0” or even “Education 2.0” could soon acquire real meaning.

26 Dec 08

A survey of corporate IT: Connecting to the cloud | On the periphery | The Economist

www.economist.com/...displaystory.cfm - Preview

CloudComputing

“Our vision is to have every book that has ever been in print available in less than 60 seconds,” explains Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss.
Digital cameras will automatically upload pictures. Smart meters will send readings of how much electricity a house consumes. All kinds of sensors will be able to send messages, even things like dipsticks when tanks of liquid are low.
8 more annotations...
- erhaps the best indicator of things to come is Intel, a huge chipmaker. It made a fortune selling processors for servers, personal computers and laptops. In June the firm launched a new line of chips called Atom, designed to power what it calls “netbooks” and “mobile internet devices” (MIDs), mainly intended for surfing the web. Intel is also the driving force behind WiMAX, a technology for wireless broadband access to the internet. It wants to put a WiMAX radio chip into as many devices as possible, from portable computers to specialised gadgets such as the Kindle.
- Apple’s iPhone and its App Store, which allows iPhone and iPod owners to download applications, also provide a foretaste of how important wireless devices will be for the cloud. Apple launched App Store only in July. Two months later it had already tallied 100m downloads, meaning that it took off much faster than Apple’s highly successful iTunes music store. Many of the programs on offer connect to the cloud, including news feeds, multi-player games and a service that keeps track of the latest polls for America’s presidential election.
- Yet the cloud’s interface is designed not merely to provide information but to gather it as well. The future belongs to services that respond in real time to information provided either by their users or by non-human sensors, predicts Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media, a publisher of technology books who coined the term “Web 2.0”. Such “live applications”, he says, will get better the more data they are able to collect—and there will be plenty as the cloud expands.
- The direct link to users also allows firms such as Google continuously to improve their interface, something traditional software-makers were not able to do. At any given time Google is running dozens of tests to optimise the look and feel of its offerings. This makes web applications far less technology-driven and much more user-oriented, says IBM’s Mr Wladawsky-Berger. “They are much more inspired by what goes on in the real world.”
- A raft of start-ups is also trying to build a business by observing its users, in effect turning them into human sensors. One is Wesabe (in which Mr O’Reilly has invested). At first sight it looks much like any personal-finance site that allows users to see their bank account and credit-card information in one place. But behind the scenes the service is also sifting through its members’ anonymised data to find patterns and to offer recommendations for future transactions based, for instance, on how much a particular customer regularly spends in a supermarket. Wireless devices, too, will increasingly become sensors that feed into the cloud and adapt to new information.
- Nokia, for its part, is planning to build all kinds of sensors into mobile phones to monitor things like movement, barometric pressure or even the owner’s health, which many experts expect to become a big new trend. Sensors could also be used to record people’s activities, creating what some already term a “lifelog”—raising all kinds of privacy concerns.
- As wireless technology gets better and cheaper, more and more different kinds of objects will connect directly to the cloud. SAP, the German software-maker, has launched a research project called “The Internet of Things” to see what can be done with the resulting information. As part of that project, an initiative called the “Future Factory” is now under way to investigate how intelligent tags can make manufacturing more adaptive and efficient.
- More and more data get you only so far, however. In the end, Google’s search results and its text-based online advertisements are relevant to users only because the firm has devised clever ways to sift through them, says Hal Varian, the firm’s chief economist. The big challenge of the cloud will be to connect the myriad data in it and make them profitable.

A survey of corporate IT: Software as a service | Creating the cumulus | The Economist

www.economist.com/...displaystory.cfm - Preview

CloudComputing

This democratisation of programming, however, is only a small part of something much deeper: a fundamental change in the nature of software. It is not just that more and more software will become a service delivered online. More importantly, applications, web-based or not, will no longer come as a big chunk of software, but will be made up of a combination of electronic services—a shift that has picked up a lot of speed since computing began moving into the cloud.
The importance of this shift from a monolithic product to services is hard to overstate. In a sense, it has seeded the cloud, allowing the droplets—the services that make up the electronic vapour—to form. It will allow computing to expand in all directions and serve ever more users. The new architecture also helps the less technically minded to shape their own clouds, using such tools as Iceberg’s.
6 more annotations...
- Similarly, the concept of modularity has been around since the early days of computing. “Everything in computer science is to just write less code. What is the technique for writing less code? It’s called subroutines,” said Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder, in a recent interview. A subroutine is a part of a program that can be re-used, just like movable type. The idea, says Mr Gates, has always been to apply this principle of a subroutine more broadly.
- Mr Gates’s subroutines: “We now live in a world where…[a] subroutine can exist on another computer across the internet.”
- AP, a German software firm, was one of the first companies to put this service-oriented architecture front and centre. Starting in 2003, it developed, among other things, a new corporate-software package that did away with monolithic applications, such as programs to keep track of a company’s finances or manage its relationship with customers. Instead, it introduced a collection of re-usable components that could be strung together at will.
- IBM, too, is a fan of SOA and web services. But its approach is somewhat different, given that it does not sell business applications but makes most of its money from IT services and software to manage the underlying computing infrastructure. IBM uses SOA mainly to help firms integrate their increasingly complex and disparate IT systems. Its software turns them into a collection of services that can be woven into business processes.
- Since then the number of such mash-ups has exploded, thanks mainly to services like Microsoft’s Popfly and Yahoo! Pipes. In essence these are graphical programming tools. Users drag and drop “modules”—data feeds providing such information as pictures, headlines and search results—and weave them together.
- More recently platforms for consumer services have been proliferating. Facebook, a social network, was the first to become one in 2007. Other big online firms have followed suit or will do so soon: Google with App Engine, Yahoo! with Y!OS and Microsoft with a “cloud operating system” thought to be called Windows Strata. Some predict a platform war to rival the epic fights between Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s Macintosh.

A survey of corporate IT: The evolution of data centres | Where the cloud meets the ground | The Economist

www.economist.com/...displaystory.cfm - Preview

CloudComputing

VMware and its competitors, which now include Microsoft, hope eventually to turn a data centre—or even several of them—into a single pool of computing, storage and networking resources that can be allocated as needed. Such a “real-time infrastructure”, as Thomas Bittman of Gartner calls it, is still years off. But the necessary software is starting to become available. In September, for instance, VMware launched a new “virtual data-centre operating system”.
Perhaps surprisingly, it is Amazon, a big online retailer, that shows where things are heading. In 2006 it started offering a computing utility called Amazon Web Services (AWS). Anybody with a credit card can start, say, a virtual machine on Amazon’s vast computer system to run an application, such as a web-based service. Developers can quickly add extra machines when needed and shut them down if there is no demand (which is why the utility is called Elastic Computing Cloud, or EC2). And the service is cheap: a virtual machine, for instance, starts at 10 cents per hour.
8 more annotations...
- If Amazon has become a cloud-computing pioneer, it is because it sees itself as a technology company. As it branched out into more and more retail categories, it had to develop a sophisticated computing platform which it is now offering as a service for a fee. “Of course this has nothing to do with selling books,” says Adam Selipsky, in charge of product management at AWS, “but it has a lot to do with the same technology we are using to sell books.”
- Yet Amazon is not the only big online company to offer the use of industrial-scale data centres. Google is said to be operating a global network of about three dozen data centres loaded with more than 2m servers (although it will not confirm this). Microsoft is investing billions and adding up to 35,000 servers a month. Other internet giants, such as Yahoo!, are also busy building huge server farms.
- But cheap electricity is only one, albeit important, criterion for choosing the site of a data centre. Microsoft currently feeds 35 sets of data into an electronic map of the world, including internet connectivity, the availability of IT workers, even the air quality (dry air makes a good coolant), to see where conditions are favourable and which places should be avoided. Apparently Siberia comes out well.
- Google, for its part, seems to be thinking of moving offshore. In August it applied for a patent for water-based data centres. “Computing centres are located on a ship or ships, anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away,” says the patent application.
- So IDC thinks that many data centres will be consolidated and given a big makeover. The industry itself is taking the lead. For example, Hewlett-Packard (HP) used to have 85 data centres with 19,000 IT workers worldwide, but expects to cut this down to six facilities in America with just 8,000 employees by the end of this year, reducing its IT budget from 4% to 2% of revenue.
- Other large organisations are following suit. Using VMware’s software, BT, a telecoms firm, has cut the number of servers in its 57 data centres across the world from 16,000 to 10,000 yet increased their workload. The US Marine Corps is reducing the number of its IT sites from 175 to about 100. Both organisations are also starting to build internal clouds so they can move applications around. Ever more firms are expected to start building similar in-house, or “private”, clouds. The current economic malaise may speed up this trend as companies strive to become more efficient.
- As a result, says Mr Staten, cloud computing has not yet moved much beyond the early-adopter phase, meaning that only a few of the bigger companies are using it, and then only for projects that do not critically affect their business. The New York Times, for instance, used Amazon’s AWS to turn Hillary Clinton’s White House schedule during her husband’s time in office, with more than 17,000 pages, into a searchable database within 24 hours. NASDAQ uses it to power its service providing historical stockmarket information, called Market Replay.
- So there will be not just one cloud but a number of different sorts: private ones and public ones, which themselves will divide into general-purpose and specialised ones. Cisco, a leading maker of networking gear, is already talking of an “intercloud”, a federation of all kinds of clouds, in the same way that the internet is a network of networks. And all of those clouds will be full of applications and services.

Kevin Kelly -- The Technium

www.kk.org/...cloud_culture.php - Preview

CloudComputing

In fact, that is apparently what happens. According the just-released Pew Internet & American Life Project report on Use of Cloud Computing (PDF), two thirds of Americans online use cloud applications, even though very few of us are aware of it.
There is a small industry of providers, suppliers and makers of applications emerging. Besides the well known clouds of Google, Amazon Web Services, there is also GridLayer, and Aptana Cloud, From the marketing page of Aptana Cloud comes this fairly utilitarian description of cloud computing from the enterprise POV:

Rather than worrying about where to host your web sites, how to configure your web server, and how to set up additional services, the Cloud enables you to push all of these concerns and worries to someone else, and more importantly, somewhere else. It's all handled for you on the internet, dynamically and completely managed. In short, all of your technology needs on the back-end are handled for you as a service, much like your electric or phone bill.
9 more annotations...
- Always On. Constant connection makes the "on" invisible. We do nothing to connect since it is now the default. It is like air. As behavior economists have shown, defaults make huge differences. The on default biases us toward connection and sharing. The always on default biases us toward expecting everything to be connected and always on. We expect all agents should always be on. All services should always be available. The drive toward 24/7 availability for everything continues. Not being always on is a disadvantage (with some exceptions). Always on also means more of our lives are captured, analyzed, digested, and "on". The more the cloud is always on, the more of our self is moved into the cloud.
- Omnigenous. The distinction between being on the cloud and off disappears as more of the world is included. In the beginning the cloud is the cloud of servers, then it becomes the cloud of servers and all our laptops, and then it includes all those plus all our mobile phones and then all our TV screens as well. As the cloud keeps improving "network effects" kick in and those improvements draw in more devices, more sensors, more chips, making it even more attractive, until the cloud is omnigenous and includes every kind of thing. Cameras, microphones -- anything producing data will shift toward the cloud. So the cloud is the first place we go to for whatever we want. We may not always find it there, but it will always be the place we begin.
- More Smarter. Clouds don't have to be smarter than the web we have now, but they are likely to be. The web can be thought of hyperlinked documents. The clouds can be thought of as hyper-linked data. Ultimately the chief reason to put things onto the cloud is to share their data deeply. Not just to have a convenient backup, or to have always on access, which the cloud WILL give, but to be able to weave together the data and interactivity of the parts, and thereby make all the pieces much smarter and more powerful than they could possibly be alone. It is not too much of an exaggeration to think of the cloud as the tool which allows us to share the elemental aspects of our data and activities in a way makes them smarter. The cloud is sort of a hivemind tool.
- Inseparable Dependence. "Always on" plus superior performance will lead to supreme dependence on our part. There is the curious paradox that as the hard-lifting computation leaves the devices near our bodies and takes place in the invisible cloud it psychologically moves the device closer to us. As devices get smarter they get more intimate. A friend of mine had to ground their teenager for a serious infraction. They took her cell phone away. They were horrified when she became physically ill. It was almost as if she had an amputation. And she had in one sense. I was reminded of the book/movie The Golden Compass wherein the children in that world have spiritual guardian animals, called demons. These intangible animals sit on their shoulders or hover nearby and advise and comfort them. The most horrible torture in this world is to be separated from your demon. In the future, the cloud and cloud intelligence will be our Golden Compass demons. Separation from the advice and comfort afforded by the cloud will be horrendous and unbearable.
- Extreme Reliability. No machine (or body) is perfect, but clouds will be more reliable than your standalone computer. The number of outage incidents recorded for clouds is fairly small given the total number of access-hours they provide. According to the Cloud Computing Incident Database there have been 11 reported incidents in 2008. My very stable Mac has frozen more times than that this year. The reliability index for the cloud will mean it will increasingly be seen as the Backup. Our life's backup. No matter how many copies of something important you have offline, it won't feel safe until you put it online, on the cloud. We may also feel that if it is only on the cloud, it is not safe, but the reliability of the cloud will likely trump our own reliability. The consensus reliability of Wikipedia is changing our attitudes about where trust lies. In cloud life we may come to trust the aggregation of all sources over any single source.
- The Extended Self. Where is my stuff? If I google my own mail to find out what I said, or rely on the cloud for my memory, where do "I" end and it starts? If all the images of my life, and all the snippets of interest, and all my notes, and all my chitchat with friends, and all my choices, and all my recommendations, and all my thoughts, and all my wishes -- if all this is sitting somewhere -- but nowhere in particular -- it changes how I think of myself. What happens if it were to go away? A very distributed aspect of me would go away. If McLuhan is right that tools are extensions of our selves -- a wheel an extended leg, a camera an extended eye -- than the cloud is our extended soul. Or, if you prefer, our extended self.
- Legal Conflict. The war over copyright will seem tame compared to the legal battles that the life in the cloud will hatch. Who's laws will prevail? The laws of your domicile, the laws of your server's domicile, or the laws of international exchange? Who gets your taxes if all the work is being done in the cloud? The transparent discontinuity between legal regimes will be a threat to the expansion of the cloud. This friction will also force the growth of multiple clouds. Clouds with varying legal frameworks will compete at the global level, although within many geographical regions, there may be little choice. But the legal issues are not merely international. Who owns the data, you or the cloud? If all your email and voice calls go through the cloud, who is responsible for what it says? In the new intimacy of the cloud, when you have half-baked thoughts, weird daydreams, should they not be treated differently than what you really believe? What are the rights (and duties) of government's attempt at justice and fairness in an always on, omni cloud.
- SharePrivacy. Privacy is over. Or more precisely, privacy as we imagined it is over. The extended self requires a different finesse for grappling with the levels of intimacy humans need. The binary functions of public/private, or even friend/not friend have to yield to more nuanced, more complex ways to describe our relationships. The Chinese have a unique name for every type of cousin (younger than you, older than you, your mom's brother, your dad's sister's son, etc.); the cloud will breed distinct ways of relating to agents we know, agents we once knew, agents we know we don't know, and so on. Sharing is the foundational action on the cloud. Some types of sharing will come to resemble what we used to call privacy. It is impossible to share the same cloud to do everything and not evolve our notions and powers of sharing.
- Socialism 2.0. The cloud is a collective. Social media is a type of socialism. Open source software projects are kinds of communitarian schemes. When people share their medical records (Patients Like Me), or personal genomes (23andme), or their family photo albums -- they are feeding a collective because by sharing them, their goods increase in value. The success of Wikipedia, Linux, and the web in general is priming a generation to be open to the power of the group. But unlike the old socialism models of old, the top-down social media of communism, the individuals are not forced to homogenize. Instead in this emerging Socialism 2.0, individuals (anyone can edit the encyclopedia!) are liberated via the power of the group. We don't have a very good vocabulary for this dynamic right now, so we are stuck using words like socialism which carry a very heavy cultural baggage. Nonetheless,

Cloud Computing Panel at Web 2.0 Summit - ReadWriteWeb

www.readwriteweb.com/...d_computing_panel_at_web_2.php - Preview

CloudComputing

Adobe's Kevin Lynch considers it his company's role to enable the "fourth generation of software" that will bring a fusion of cloud computing and rich desktop applications to users (by using Adobe Air, of course).
At the same time, though, he also acknowledged that Adobe is looking at purely web-based applications with Photoshop.com and Acrobat.com, though he sees Adobe's focus as being on enabling technologies.
1 more annotations...
- In contrast to this, Dave Girouard, who manages Google's enterprise business, sees it as Google's mission to bring users "entirely into the cloud" and not just to create a "cloud-like" experience.

09 Nov 08

A survey of corporate IT: IT's global “cloud” | Let it rise | The Economist

www.economist.com/...displaystory.cfm - Preview

CloudComputing

The rise of the cloud is more than just another platform shift that gets geeks excited. It will undoubtedly transform the information technology (IT) industry, but it will also profoundly change the way people work and companies operate. It will allow digital technology to penetrate every nook and cranny of the economy and of society, creating some tricky political problems along the way.
In fact, the cloud craze may have peaked already, if the number of Google searches is any guide (see chart 1). Cloud computing is bound to go through a “trough of disillusionment”, as Gartner, a research firm, calls the phase in the hype cycle when technologies fail to meet expectations and quickly cease to be fashionable. Much still needs to be invented for the computing sky to become truly cloudy.
1 more annotations...
- In the years to come companies are likely to venture much farther. For one, operators of computing clouds such as Amazon and Google have shown that this is a far more efficient way of running IT systems. Secondly, many firms will find they have no choice. The way in which their IT infrastructure has grown is proving unsustainable. Most corporate data centres today are complex warrens of underused hardware that require more and more people, space and power to keep them going. The current economic malaise will increase the pressure on companies to become more efficient. More has to be done with less, which is cloud computing’s main promise.

Web 2.0 Summit: Cloud Computing Smackdown -- Coud Computing -- InformationWeek

www.informationweek.com/...showArticle.jhtml - Preview

CloudComputing

VMwave's Martiz offered his version of the remark: "The Microsoft Azure announcement is a great effort by Ray [Ozzie] to turn an oil tanker."
In otherwise, until the dust settles and issues of data portability, application portability, and data ownership get resolved to the satisfaction of necessarily risk-averse companies, you may have no choice but to pick a side.

Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing - O'Reilly Radar

radar.oreilly.com/...eb-20-and-cloud-computing.html - Preview

CloudComputing Important

Monopoly issues aside, could you imagine such a company? We wouldn't be talking about a multi-billion dollar business like today's Microsoft or Google. We're talking about something that could feasibly dwarf them. We're potentially talking about a multi-trillion dollar company. Possibly the largest company to have ever existed.

01 Oct 08

Stallman: Cloud computing is 'stupidity' | Business Tech - CNET News

news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10054253-92.html - Preview

CloudComputing

Stallman says cloud computing forces people to hand over control of their information to a third party. His objections echo his longstanding belief in non-proprietary software. "One reason you should not use Web applications to do your computing is that you lose control," he said. "It's just as bad as using a proprietary program.
Stallman dismisses cloud computing as industry bluster. "It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign," he said. "Somebody is saying this is inevitable--and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true."

27 Sep 08

Official Google Blog: The intelligent cloud

googleblog.blogspot.com/...intelligent-cloud.html - Preview

CloudComputing DataMining

Thus, computer systems will have greater opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans. They will get smarter, gleaning relationships between objects, nuances, intentions, meanings, and other deep conceptual information. Today's Google search uses an early form of this approach, but in the future many more systems will be able to benefit from it.
"Find me a story with an exciting chase scene and a happy ending."
3 more annotations...
- people speaking one language can seamlessly interact with people and information in other languages.
- The impact of such systems will go well beyond Google. Researchers across medical and scientific fields can access massive data sets and run analysis and pattern detection algorithms that aren't possible today. The proposed Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), for example, may generate over 15 terabytes of new data per day! Virtually any research field will benefit from systems with the ability to gather, manipulate, and learn from datasets at that scale.
- Traditionally, systems that solve complicated problems and queries have been called "intelligent", but compared to earlier approaches in the field of 'artificial intelligence', the path that we foresee has important new elements. First of all, this system will operate on an enormous scale with an unprecedented computational power of millions of computers. It will be used by billions of people and learn from an aggregate of potentially trillions of meaningful interactions per day. It will be engineered iteratively, based on a feedback loop of quick changes, evaluation, and adjustments. And it will be built based on the needs of solving and improving concrete and useful tasks such as finding information, answering questions, performing spoken dialogue, translating text and speech, understanding images and videos, and other tasks as yet undefined. When combined with the creativity, knowledge, and drive inherent in people, this "intelligent cloud" will generate many surprising and significant benefits to mankind.

06 Sep 08

HP Shane Robison Executive Viewpoint: The Next Wave: Everything as a Service

www.hp.com/...08eaas.html - Preview

CloudComputing

Everything as a Service
The true power of the cloud happens when you have continuous interaction between your device — your smartphone, laptop, TV — and the network, and they jointly act on your behalf. Here’s a simple example: say it’s 2 p.m. and your calendar shows you’re booked on a flight to Toronto at 6 p.m. Your device should have the smarts to anticipate what information you’ll need for this trip and then proactively gather it for you — a weather forecast for the Toronto area, a status update on your flight, a recommended route to the airport based on up-to-the-minute traffic conditions, and so on. In this scenario, the big step forward is the pervasive, proactive and highly personalized nature of cloud services.
6 more annotations...
- As broadband Internet access goes global and mobile, we have a legitimate opportunity to complete the transition from a web of static pages to a web of dynamic services. This can only happen if the IT industry does the hard work necessary to put the final pieces of the puzzle in place. That brings us back to the need for a higher level of intelligence built into our devices, our networks, and the software that ties it all together.
  
  The shift to cloud computing will dramatically reduce the cost of information technology, but let’s be clear — the implications of this particular shift go far beyond cost savings. The big disruptor over the next several years will be our ability to deliver a meaningful improvement in the user experience. If we are successful in doing that, we will create the next wave of growth for the technology industry.
- The digital world will converge with the physical world: Back in 1995, the mantra was, “Everything is virtual. Geography is irrelevant.” But from now on, factors such as your physical location mean a lot. Cloud services will be increasingly aware of the context you’re in, right down to details such as the time, the weather, where you’re headed, and which friends or business colleagues happen to be present nearby.
- The era of device-centric computing is over. Connectivity-centric computing will take center-stage: People often ask, “When am I going to get that one device that does everything I can imagine?” Flip that equation on its head. What you really want is the ability to use any number of devices, and have them all provide easy access to the services and content you care about. Devices will continue to play an important role, but in the next phase they become interchangeable — and the cloud services become the focal point.
- Publishing will be democratized. A global Internet population of 1.2 billion people now has the tools to produce everything from books and magazines to music and videos. This represents a massive disruption of old publishing models. People will soon have the ability to print on demand any book ever published. The concept of “out of print” will be a thing of the past. Similarly, warehouses of physical inventory in the publishing world will no longer be necessary.
- Crowd-sourcing is going mainstream and will change the rules of the game forever. Fortune 50 companies will access top talent on a global basis via the Internet, saving millions of dollars in professional services, from occupations as diverse as accountants, advertising experts, attorneys, and engineers. Reputation systems will lower the risks involved by exposing the poor performers. One example of this shift to crowd sourcing is HP’s Logoworks service, which is transforming the graphics design industry.
- Enterprises will use radically different tools to make key business decisions, including systems to accurately predict the future. A merger is taking place between the structured data that fuels business intelligence and the unstructured data of the web. This combination represents a kind of Holy Grail that will advance the state of the art in business intelligence. At the same time, market-based systems that enable you to accurately predict the future will become common practice in the enterprise.

05 Sep 08

Google’s Top 10 Cloud Computing List | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

blogs.zdnet.com/BTL - Preview

CloudComputing

8. Chat with customers and partners in any language: Glotzbach offered a very cool demo of translation bots built into Google Talk. Business is global but often times, language becomes a barrier. The translation bots within Google Talk allows instant communications between people who normally would have to arrange for translators to help with the conversations. And once developers start mashing the tools into things like emails or documents, it could potentially revolutionize the speed of global business.

20 Aug 08

Dell and Facebook prepping 'significant' announcement | News - Digital Media - CNET News.com

news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10020590-93.html - Preview

Facebook CloudComputing

Two of the biggest names in tech are teaming up on a cloud computing project that they plan to announce at a special event next week.

Facebook amasses billions of photos, friend connections, and status updates and stores them up in "the cloud," and Dell is working on being one of the main providers of the infrastructure--servers--that makes the cloud possible.

17 Aug 08

cloud failures are serious time to revisit P2P?

www.readwriteweb.com/...le_failures_serious_time_t.php - Preview

P2P CloudComputing

You need $ gazillions to be a Cloud Computing Platform. Those server farms cost a lot. Skimping, or misjudging demand, leads to outages, slow response and other confidence-killers. This is a game for the big boys - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, AT&T, Sun. These are all American firms, with access to plenty of capital. Disruptive innovation usually comes from start-ups that are starved for capital. You replace capital with technical innovation. That was true for Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, AT&T, Sun as well when they started.

That is why I have believed for some time that P2P is the next big disruptive technology at the infrastructure level.

08 Aug 08

Inside the Cloud: 9 Sectors to Watch - GigaOM

gigaom.com/...loud-computingsectors-to-watch - Preview

CloudComputing Important

Takuya Homma's Library tagged CloudComputing → View Popular

And Data for All: Why Obama's Geeky New CIO Wants to Put All Gov't Info Online

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Another little IBM deal

Information technology without borders | Clouds and judgment | The Economist

A survey of corporate IT: The economics of the cloud | Highs and lows | The Economist

A survey of corporate IT: The long nimbus | The Economist

A survey of corporate IT: Connecting to the cloud | On the periphery | The Economist

A survey of corporate IT: Software as a service | Creating the cumulus | The Economist

A survey of corporate IT: The evolution of data centres | Where the cloud meets the ground | The Economist

Kevin Kelly -- The Technium

Cloud Computing Panel at Web 2.0 Summit - ReadWriteWeb

A survey of corporate IT: IT's global “cloud” | Let it rise | The Economist

Web 2.0 Summit: Cloud Computing Smackdown -- Coud Computing -- InformationWeek

Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing - O'Reilly Radar

Stallman: Cloud computing is 'stupidity' | Business Tech - CNET News

Official Google Blog: The intelligent cloud

HP Shane Robison Executive Viewpoint: The Next Wave: Everything as a Service

Google’s Top 10 Cloud Computing List | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Dell and Facebook prepping 'significant' announcement | News - Digital Media - CNET News.com

cloud failures are serious time to revisit P2P?

Inside the Cloud: 9 Sectors to Watch - GigaOM

Selected Tags

Related Tags

Sponsored Links

Top Contributors

Groups interested in CloudCom...

NMC Horizon Project

Sql Librarian

Cloud Computing