IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) loves the cloud. The company has a CTO for Cloud Computing, Kristof Kloeckner, and his Interop speech this morning included some numbers to back up IBM's cloud worship, Information Week reports. IT labor costs could be cut in half, and capital utilization could be boosted 75 percent, he said.
Microsoft loves the cloud. In a Sunday keynote at the company's Convergence 2010 conference in Atlanta, division head Stephen Elop called it a moneymaking proposition for Microsoft, BusinessWeek reports. He also said 90 percent of Microsoft's engineers could soon be doing cloud-related work, probably under a broad definition of "related."
Guess who doesn't love the cloud...
Remember, back in January, how Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison railed against cloud computing mania? This video comes from four months earlier but got revived this week by news regurgitator Khabar24. Buried in Ellison's schtick is his important point: What matters about "cloud" is the (very old) idea of renting.
(The guy does know how to work a crowd. Admit it, it would be awesome if he bought the Golden State Warriors. He and Mark Cuban could yell at each other as halftime entertainment.)
Security remains a bugaboo for would-be cloud services users. F5 Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: FFIV) enhanced its cloud security as part of the BIG-IP version 10.2 release announced this week.
Cisco, meanwhile, introduced the ScanSafe Web filtering service, which is based on its acquisition of ScanSafe in December. (See Cisco to Acquire ScanSafe.) What's new is that ScanSafe's user-behavior reports can now take a longer-term view, to better track trends, as Network World notes.
A cloud computing analyst saying, "This is not just analysts hyping things up" is probably going to find a tough audience.
The quote was given to the BBC yesterday by analyst Philip Carnelley of TechMarketView, defending his company's prediction of cloud-computing spend in the UK doubling by 2012.
And it's admittedly hard to take at face value, as blogger Brad Casemore pointed out.
The doubling would come off a small base, as an Ovum Ltd. analyst points out in the article. Carnelley's prediction would put cloud computing at a £1.2 billion (US$1.85 billion) business in 2012.
Is some large, medium and small companies all showing how, over a period of time (a year?), using cloud services impacted costs, productivity, and corporate/working culture. It's all very well IBM giving us figures (though I'm sure those figures are based on detailed and relevant research) but the real world always throws up other factors (particularly the human one...)
re: Cloud Watch: Lots of Talk You probably need a three- to five-year period to assess the real impact of a shift like this. Human factor, Ray? I thought that got taken out of the equation when May Day got turned into a bank holiday.
and to respond to the time-period - yes, you need some considerable time to mark the REAL impact of something like this, but early indicators are still helpful and important, just as they were when some small companies shifted early to VOIP at their business locations and found them selves reaching for the mobile phones far too regularly....
NO, they more highlighted some of the issues and problems related to deployment, especially around a wholesale migration to a new service without backup.
In the case of 'cloud services' I'm sure no one will trust all of their computing and application resources to the cloud (though you never know, in the case of SMBs), but even the early adopters who try it out for one site/one app etc will be provide more insight than a large tech provider, in my view.
re: Cloud Watch: Lots of Talk Did those early indicators serve as predictors of uptake? Our corporate VOIP system is wicked bad (not in a good way), but it is VOIP.
Well, I currently work for what would be called an SMB that has applications that I might put on the cloud for scalability and redundancy. The alternate choice is to move them into our data center colos on specific servers we own.
The stuff I am likely to do first will deal with customer service operations of our network much of the scalability will be done through outsourcing Tier 1 support and similar things. I have not evaluated which will be easier to do, although we do have open space in the colo cages.
What I am not ready to put into the cloud is our application service. That is partly due to the app itself and partly due to control issues. If I push the management platform into the cloud, I might become more comfortable over time.
Given the fact that Oracle earns a lot from database (rather structured and relational database products) it is not a surprise that it does not like the cloud.
The real issue with cloud is not about whether it will succeed or not, right now it is a free for all in the sense that every offering is definig it in a manner that is suited to itself.
This will add a lot of confusion in the market place.
Also development of applications and software suited to exploit cloud to its advantages is not as trivial as it is made to look by all the marketing handouts.
The issues of concurrency, data atomicity, reliability and other aspects will have to be re-interpreted for a different type of architecture principles.
Cloud has definitely covered a lot of distance, it still has to cover a lot.
> The real issue with cloud is not about whether it will succeed or not, right now it is a free for all in the sense that every offering is definig it in a manner that is suited to itself.
Certainly true, and it's one of the reasons the sector is so easy to make fun of.
Oracle will eventually do its share of cloud marketing hype, I would imagine. They already hold customer seminars on the topic. They'll find a way to start talking about Cloud.
For now, it's making for some nice schtick from Ellison -- partly, I think, because he's tired of being asked how Cloud will kill off Oracle. (His adamant answer is that it won't.)
To save this item to your list of favorite Light Reading content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
If you found this interesting or useful, please use the links to the services below to share it with other readers. You will need a free account with each service to share an item via that service.
(9) | 
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
Tweet This