Eclipse Internet Blog

My blogging colleague Neil Strenge & I tend, as each week progresses, to watch the clouds. We each have our reasons, but what we share is a desire to foretell what the weather will be during the coming weekend. Unfortunately at that point our wishes diverge, Neil wants to see signs of wind coming whereas what I’m looking for is an indication of quiet weather. In truth it’s not the clouds themselves that we try to read, but the sequence that we see the clouds change that tells us what is coming.

The hot topic in technology circles is “Cloud Computing”; and at the moment we don’t have to look too far to get news. Search most media sites for “Cloud Computing” and the list shows many recent entries on the subject. What is proving far more difficult is reading the forecast for when we’ll be using the cloud, but last weeks announcements by Microsoft are quite important.

One problem here is that the term “Cloud Computing” has different meanings to different people, so when you read another news article on the “cloud” then you need to bear the context in mind. Mention “cloud” and you could be talking about:

·         Hosted computer facilities running somewhere out in the world
·         Development tools allowing programmers to write applications that can be hosted out somewhere in the world
·         Applications software running somewhere out in the world

I’ve made some pretty gross simplifications above, but the key words are somewhere out in the world. In cloud computing you don’t need to know where you are getting the service from, only that you are getting the service.

For a small business, I’d say that it’s the third category of business applications that will be the most useful. Buying software to run my business usually comes with a few added (some might say “diverting”) challenges such as acquiring the compute power needed to run that software, or training staff to use the software and keep it running day after day.

How much easier it is to contract for the service being run for you (often labelled “Software as a Service”), our own hosted email service for example. That way, as you grow the problem of expanding that service is with the provider not with you, you just ask for more seats or more capabilities and it is the providers job to deliver as agreed. That is the promise of cloud computing, the ability to easily scale your business software according to your needs. The problem is that there are not a lot of business software applications available in the cloud right now; first we need the hosted compute facilities and then, more importantly, the software developers to use the development tools to get on and produce the business services for us.

It comes back to reading the sequence of the clouds: we can see the compute facilities for example in the BBC news item broadcast last Monday and summarised on the BBC website. We can see providers such as Google making development tools available as described by Stephen Fry in the Guardian newspaper last month. Now we have to wait for real business applications to come to the market to add to small number of offerings currently around dominated by SalesForce.com. The forecast is looking good, but we don’t know how long we’ll be waiting. That makes Microsoft’s announcement of new facilities under the “Azure” codename last week suddenly look very interesting.

It’s always been a computing mantra to reuse software wherever you can rather than start all over again. The Microsoft Azure announcement offers the software developers a chance to quickly change existing applications to run on a cloud model, and being Microsoft there is a lot of software out there ready to change. Hopefully this means that we will see an acceleration in the number of business applications coming into this market place Watch this space!