Author: Dr Will Venters

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

Google Atmosphere

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Google Atmosphere Event

I attended this great event at which Nicholas Carr, Werner Vogels and Geoffrey Moore presented.

My notes on the meeting were (and these are not verbatim – mistakes may have been made).

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Nicholas Carr:

Drawing on his book (http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/bigswitch/) he argued that the Mainframe was “impersonal computer utility” and that “the power works [that is the belts and pullys of steam power] in the 1900 factories is the ERP/Oracle/SAP solutions of today”

Christensen’s innovators dilemma is introduced to argue that Cloud is a distruptive technology which will punch through our exiting models of IT trajectory.

The rest of the talk was very much aligned with the book – though no less useful because of this. I will not summarise this here though.

Werner Vogels: CTO/VP of Amazon argued that their involvement is not to sell unused server capacity (as often suspected of a company which has massive demand at certain peek periods). Rather it is because Cloud capitalises on their focus on providing scaled reliability at low cost/high volume. This is the essence of all Amazon business he argues.

As such he states that the 2008 Gartner definition misses the point – Cloud is about “on demand services” and “pay as you go”.

Amazon provides an enterprise platform (which Marks and Spencer and Mothercare are using) for eCommerce. It is not new to enterprise applications. By doing this these companies can scale up their sales operations during the key periods.

Amazon also announced its provision of Virtual Private Clouds (subnets of a companies data-centre hosted by a cloud provider and accessed by VPN).

Another interesting example of the use of AWS was the Guardian newspapers review of MP expenses. Their competitor (the daily telegraph) had had lots of time to do detailed analysis. In contrast the Guardian hosted it on the cloud then invited individuals (the wisdom of the crowd) to look at their individual MPs expenses. This led to very quick response and analysis.

Finally Indiana Speedway provides a multimedia streaming of its races using AWS when the race is running – other times it remains dormant.

Other companies using AWS: EPSN, Playfish, Autodesk, Pfizer (using VPC) NetFlix and LiveStream. Finally Intuit (a tax services which scales on April Tax day).

In response to questions of security the answer is “how secure is the corporate data centre” – use of cloud to respond to a Denial of Service Attack better than corporates. Security innovation is moving ahead in the cloud – e.g. Subnet Direction.

Amazon is providing tools to users to allow them to know the location of their data. And they have provided seperated datacentres to store EU data not outside.

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More Soon

CSC Cloud: What is Cloud Computing?

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http://assets1.csc.com/uk/downloads/Cloud.pdf

CSC provide another Cloud Computing White Paper. Like most other companies they are relying on the “Electricity Utility” analogy in their description of clouds.

The first item on their list of “should you care about the cloud” is “Aligning costs with use – dynamically”. The second item also concerns cost  – “Cutting the TCO”.

Third on their list is innovation, with speed to market fourth, and “keeping things running smoothly” as fifth (clearly a poor premise given its assumption that the Cloud is smoother). Finally their sixth reason relates to collaboration though rather vaguely – “Inspiring people to collaborate in new ways”.

This seems rather interesting – a rather downbeat and qualified reason for going to the cloud without a focus on new opportunities or risks.

Google Apps for Business – is this really cloud computing

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Business email, calendar, documents and intranet sites for your company – Google Apps for Business.

I wonder what the difference is between this form of application hosting and internal application hosting on a server. When you install Exchange on a local server Microsoft handles the configuration of the machine, and the basic requirements. Moving to the cloud is thus about what we choose the application to manage (in the cloud then the application manages the whole hardware stack – on the server it manages just the releavant resources)…

My question is thus is SaaS cloud computing or not?

Cloud Computing – A Classification, Business Models, and Research Directions

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I came across the following paper:

Weinhardt, C., A. Anandasivam, et al. (2009). “Cloud Computing – A Classification, Business Models, and Research Directions.” Business & Information Systems Engineering 1(5): 391-399.

The papers aim are to identify criteria to distinguish between Grids and Clouds. This is used to present business models ensuring Clouds sustainability. Finally the future of Cloud computing is mapped, suggesting relevant research directions. (P392).

More soon…

CSDL – IEEE Internet Computing

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CSDL – IEEE Internet Computing. (September/October issue) 5

This special issue of the IEEE Internet Computing journal has a number of relevant papers on Cloud Computing.

The editorial (“having One’s Head in the Cloud) notes that we have come full circle – and that our idea of clouds is similar to the 1970s dumb-terminal acting as I/O device to a behemoth database. The central management this provided benefits but slowly we moved to the local PC.

Interestingly the editorial suggests the user as in control of the movement to the PC and subsequently the cloud. The argument is founded on the difficulties managing the updating of software (e.g. anti-virus) and of backup. The move to the cloud is thus about freeing us from this burden and is a return back to the mainframe (or at least a federated collection of mainframes).

But here I disagree with the editorial –  the key difference is that this is a federated collection of “mainframes” not just one at a time. On a dumb-terminal it was difficult to integrate and “mashup” services from multiple machines locally… on the cloud this is second nature.

Leiba, B. (2009). “Having One’s Head in the Cloud.” IEEE Internet Computing 13(5): 4-6.

Cloud and the ambedexterous organisation.

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There is much recent literature on the ambidextrous organisation… What does this mean for Cloud computing? If cloud enables organisations to change size and shape quickly (without rewiring or purchasing software/hardware) then perhaps it has a place… something to discuss more.

(E.g. Ågerfalk, P. J. and B. Fitzgerald (2006 ). “Introduction: SPECIAL ISSUE: Flexible and distributed software processes: old petunias in new bowls?” Communications of the ACM 49 (10): 26 – 34. )

Why Utility matters?

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The aim of this blog is to develop a dialogue on the nature of Utility, Cloud and Grid Computing which looks beyond the technical (as characterised by the Computer Science debates), and beyond the managerial (as characterised by, for example Nicholas Carr’s work “the Big Switch), to seek an view which is practical, grounded in management practice, and yet reflective of the technical challenges these technologies face.

The blog will follow my research interests and general reading on this topic.