Author: Dr Will Venters

Lecturer in Information Systems, Department of Management, London School of Economics.

CohesiveFT

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This is a company to watch http://www.cohesiveft.com/ – they have two products:

VPN-Cubed provides a virtual network onto the network of a cloud provider. This enables first to keep a standard networking layer which is consistent even if the cloud provided network changes (e.g. IP address changes).

Elastic Server allows real-time assembly and management of software components. This allows the quick creation of easy to use applications which can be easily sent to various cloud services.

However it is the fact that together these services allow virtual machines and cloud services to be moved between cloud IaaS providers without significant real-time work which is important. If their products live up to the promise then users can move to the cheapest cloud provider with ease so driving down costs to commodity supplier levels… and creating the spot market for cloud.

Cloud Will Transform Business As We Know It: The Secret’s In The Source

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I am involved in the following seminar based on joint research we are doing on Cloud Computing…

 

 

 
HfS Research, in partnership with the Outsourcing Unit of the London School of Economics, is hosting a special webinar, sponsored by Accenture, on the groundbreaking study of Cloud Business Services that HfS and LSE recently released.

Join HfS Research Founder and CEO Phil Fersht, HfS Managing Director Euan Davis, Professor Leslie Willcocks, Professor for Work, Technology and Globalization at London School of Economics, and Managing Director of Cloud Services at Accenture Jimmy Harris.

The issues on the table include:

– The contrasting views and intentions of business and IT executives toward Cloud Business Services

– The impact of Cloud on work culture and delivering competitive advantage

– How both business and IT executives need to tool-up and prepare to adopt Cloud Business Services

– The crucial role service providers need to play as Cloud Business enablers for today’s organizations

 

 

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/744155947

 

How big is cloud computing?

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For those desperate to understand the market size of Cloud, two articles in the recent news provide interesting insight. The first, from the Economist, demonstrates ClockKick’s attempts to estimate Amazon’s virtual computer provision, and estimates 90000 servers for Amazon – in the USA East-Coast only!

Quote: “Randy Bias, the boss of Cloudscaling, a IT-engineering firm, did not use these results when he put Amazon’s annual cloud-computing revenues at between $500m and $700m in 2010. And in August UBS, an investment bank, predicted that they will total $500m in 2010 and $750m in 2011.” (Economist 29th December 2010).

Information technology goes global: Tanks in the cloud | The Economist.

Another interesting thing to watch is Intel’s profits which have risen “thanks to server sales”. Making profits of $3.4bn in current economic times is tough – as the flat sales of PCs is testament. It is in the sales of servers that this profit has been made. A large proportion of these servers must be going into cloud,  either to replace ageing (and power-hungry expensive data-centers) with virtualised servers (as private clouds in some form) or to provide  public cloud offering (and SaaS services such as FaceBook and Google) within newly developed data centers.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12187653

Accenture Outlook: The coming of the cloud corporation

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I have written, with two colleagues, an article for Accenture’s Outlook journal which introduces the idea of the Cloud Corporation:

Accenture Outlook: The coming of the cloud corporation.

The article discusses various trends in outsourcing which will impact upon Cloud (and vice versa).

Cloud computing remains focused on cost cutting achieved through new technology, however lessons from the past suggest that this is only a minor part of the disruptive innovation which Cloud may offer. In particular we should not ask “what is cloud computing?” but rather “why is cloud computing?” – in essence exploring the pressures on innovation today which resonate with the idea of utility computing.

While the cost saving is an important incremental innovation on existing practices, it is cloud’s potential to allow new forms of organisational collaboration which offer the potential of radical innovation. Moving the data-centre outside the organisation asks us to evaluate the relationship between the data-centre and the organisation. Is it “ours” to horde and control, or are parts of it able to be shared, opened, exploited by others (partners, customers, suppliers etc)? In turn does this opening of the relationship between the organisation and its information recast the organisation itself?

 

Hosting in the Cloud is fantastic – as long as Joe Lieberman doesn’t complain

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The Guardian is today reporting that WikiLeaks has had its site removed from Amazon servers after Joe Lieberman put political influence on Amazon.

WikiLeaks website pulled by Amazon after US homeland security pressure | Media | The Guardian.

Whatever the ins and outs of the story, this is an example of an outsourcer (Amazon) for WikiLeaks swaying to political pressure and reputation risk and in response effectively destroying its client’s business. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case it would have taken a court-order to enter a WikiLeak’s data-centre and physically turn off a server.

Catch me at the Cloud Business Summit tomorrow.

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Leslie Willcocks will be presenting some of our joint work (with Edgar Whitley and myself) on Cloud Computing and Outsourcing at the Cloud Business Summit tomorrow… I am attending if anyone wants to grab a coffee. Drop me an email.

http://www.businesscloud9.com/summit/2010

 

The Outsourcing Enterprise: From Cost Management to Cloud Services

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I am teaching/facilitating  an Executive Summer School this coming summer in which my research on Cloud Computing and on Utility Computing will be presented…  In particular the team believe that Cloud needs to learn the lessons of Outsourcing. At the moment the focus is (as it was with early outsourcing) focused on cost reduction and Capex / Opex transfer. But those who had their fingers burned with the outsourcing craze quickly learned that it is through strategic collaboration rather than cost reduction that value is achieved.  Cloud providers and companies considering the cloud need to learn these lessons if they are to avoid the mistakes of the past.

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This course offers in-depth coverage of the key issues, developments and management challenges in today’s global sourcing marketplace. It provides a learning vehicle and tools, in terms of key frameworks, principles and practices, for those preparing themselves for general management  in major organizational functions or for more specific global sourcing roles, and also for experienced managers who wish to move to the next level. It  focuses on the needs of managers and senior executives working in client companies and service suppliers. It covers global sourcing, strategy, Information Technology outsourcing (ITO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) including the most recent developments in sourcing and offshoring  for such major areas as HR, Finance and Accounting, Procurement, Legal and Knowledge (KPO) functions.

To find out more click here.

The Outsourcing Enterprise: From Cost Management to Cloud Services

Using rented computing to crack passwords.

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Cloud computing is open to everyone – good or bad.  Here we see someone renting computing power for a couple of dollars to crack an SHA-1 password. Imagine the potential of a competitor  using a few thousand pounds worth of computing potential to crack your passwords… or a disgruntled employee launching an attack with some of their severance. See the following article from the Register for more information.

German hacker uses rented computing to crack hashing algorithm • The Register.

The Industry Speaks about Cloud, Part II: business execs fear its impact on work culture; IT execs doubt their ability to drive competitive advantage

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The Industry Speaks about Cloud, Part II: business execs fear its impact on work culture; IT execs doubt their ability to drive competitive advantage.

Friends at Horses for Sources(www.horsesforsources.com )  have published their next analysis of the huge survey we worked on together. Read their comments on the focus of Cloud Computing on work culture.

As HfS discuss, the study suggests business executives fear major cultural change  and change in working practices, whereas for IT executives the fears are more about curtailment of their value as technology-enablers within businesses.

Read their blog entry for full details.