SaaS, clouds and things
Posted by Jaco van Rooijen
When people ask my mom what I do for a living, she normally answers with something along the lines of “works with computers”. I honestly don’t know how I am going to explain to her what this blog is about.
I attended the Cloud Forum 2010 conference today. Now, the conference is largely aimed at the end users and their IT management who are the ones that are being sold the benefits of “moving to the cloud“. And by elimination, WE are therefore either the service provider they move from or the ones that they would be moving to! What I am often reading about & are trying to learn is this – as a SaaS provider, how do we stay ahead of this move. Should we be a cloud based service provider at all?
In most of the breakout sessions, people presented their company’s vision & product or showed client cases of how their services was successfully applied. It becomes clear to me that the cloud is not a silver bullet, a solution that fits all problems. But it is a game changer. But what is it really?
I’ve had a Hotmail account for over 15 years now. Mail as a Service. Delivered from a data centre somewhere in the US. Those web-based services were really the start of the cloud, except we called it by other names. There’s a point where you can pay a small fee & your google mail account size grows. We talk about elasticity, this growing ability.
Ezwim has products that are only accessible via the internet. As with Yahoo or Google mail, you use the product in your internet browser. It doesn’t come on a CD and there is nothing you need to install on your PC to make it work. Software as a Service. Even Microsoft is seeing this trend and is moving to make Microsoft Office available on the internet. No install required.
You can rent a virtual server from Amazon & if you pay more, the server becomes stronger & faster & has more memory & more storage. And there is none of the old opening the box, removing the old bits & putting in more powerful bits. You press the button & it gets bigger, and when you don’t need it, you press another button & it gets smaller. Platform as a Service. You can run your company’s file server or mail server or SAP system on one of these platforms.
We have a technology in the PC and server world called RAID. A way of splitting your data into portions & putting them on multiple disks. Many reasons, amongst them these two. Safety: if one disk breaks, we can recreate what was stored on it from the bits that was stored on the others. Performance: you’re able to write a large chunk of data quickly, because every disk only writes a small portion. Now, in the cloud, out there on the internet, there are technologies that does this on a grand scale. They store data across an incredibly large number of disks that is located across large numbers of data centres across the globe. Why? Safety & Performance. When one Yahoo or Google centre is down, the data is still everywhere & it is available VERY VERY fast. It is the type of technology that allows me to find an email from my wife about a show we were going to see in 2008 with my phone faster than I can find the last mail from my boss on my local mail program. We have grown used to these services, without appreciating the nature of the underlying change.
You start putting these things together & you begin to see what the cloud is. It is more than just “doing what we used to do, but only over the internet”. Cloud based services can grow when you need it, and shrink when you don’t. And you only pay per use; no investment required on your side. It has the potential to do things like data analysis better than we did before.
It becomes clear to me that we and our customers would benefit from moving to the cloud. But how? Step 1 seems to me that virtual server idea. Do not buy another server, but rent a virtual one. I’ve talked to some hosting providers that rent these virtual platforms as a service. We would need to re-skill some of our people. Traditional IT support people will not be needed to support platforms that are virtual; but our world is getting bigger and much more integrated and we need a new breed of IT support to orchestrate it.
I’ve also talked to some providers of telephony services – VoIP phones with a telephone exchange somewhere in the cloud. If we rent that type of service, I would be able to use my Android phone to make landline calls and use a little program on my laptop to answer my office phone when I am working from home.
The final session of the day was given by Rob Creemers, who call himself a trend watcher and market analyst. He showed a timeline graph that shows the industrial revolution, the information revolution and a new revolution – the cloud revolution. The current explosion of computing power becoming available will change the face of the earth, the way the industrial revolution did. He described advances in technology over the last 20 years and showed some current developments & some extrapolation of where this could take us. You already get TVs that have microphones & video cameras built-in, and that comes with Skype for video conferencing with the family. And he described what our footprint is doing to our planet; some pointers about oil & coal-burning and global warming. His best advice for the situation is that we should “move bytes and not atoms”. Use IP-based services to tele-commute instead of physically moving everyone to the same location. Use video conferencing tools instead of flying people to meetings.
The devices that we carry around with us, like our laptops and mobile phones, and the ones in our homes, like the TV, is allowing us to access this brave new world called the cloud. Now I must find a way to move my work deliverables there too.
