Pro-Clouders to Debate with Skeptics

Know any cloud skeptics in your circle of friends and professional associates that would be okay with sharing their views with the world?

Cloud expert and fellow blogger Phil Wainewright is staging something called the “Summer Slam 2010,” a webcast in which organizer Appirio, a cloud integrator, Wainewright and others will debate  the future of the public cloud. Some questions they’ll consider: “Will companies move 100% to the public cloud?  How will companies handle SaaS silos? Are hybrid cloud environments the end game? What is the public cloud’s biggest limitation to widespread adoption?”

This event is a follow-up to Waineright’s Forecasting Fisticuffs webinar that was held last January and was apparently a huge success, as 2,000 people either attended or listened to the webinar replay. But what Waineright and his buddies are looking for is someone who is a complete skeptic on the promise of the cloud and what it can deliver in terms of revolutionary efficiencies and savings to businesses of all sizes. Do you know someone like that? Well, they’re invited to participate in the webinar debate — which will take place Thursday, Aug. 19th at 10 am Pacific time. Hurry, though, nominations for the biggest cloud skeptic in your life will only be accepted until this Friday, August 8th. Send your nomination via Twitter (Tweet about it using the hashtag #SSLAM2010 or post to Appirio’s Facebook page.

You can also use this link to register for the webinar.

Personally, I’m definitely going to try to attend this, or at least watch the replay. Because, as you can probably guess what I’m about to say: I am surely a cloud enthusiast…not a skeptic, having seen my cloud-based monitoring business take off in leaps and bounds, and listening to the growing din of enthusiasm of my client base for moving apps and data onto the cloud — not just to save money but also (for smaller clients) to gain greater IT resources than they could ever leverage themselves. So, I’m anxious to hear the latest negative viewpoints and dark visions.

Frankly, this optimism among my client base is one of the reasons we keep innovating and enhancing our monitoring tools.  For example, Monitis just now this week is rolling out new video tutorials to guide users through setting up each type of monitor. The videos are located under the Resources tab of our homepage.  One of the videos is for Full Page Load monitoring, which has been a huge hit since we added it to our services a few weeks ago. It allows users to analyze how objects in their webpage are loading in real browsers in different parts of the world and identify bottlenecks. This is an extremely important measure for understanding user experience, as studies have shown that even a slight lag in load time can cause a noticeable drop in viewership and sales.

So, if cloud-based services, such as full-page load monitoring, can help companies reduce leakage in viewership and sales, and we can prove it, I find it hard to swallow skepticism about that!

Perhaps some people see cloud computing in terms that are too simplistic, e.g., you adopt or don’t, it’s one kind or nothing. Not ING Americas, the U.S. division of the Dutch banking firm.

I recently read in a banking magazine that ING was first attracted to the concept of cloud computing when it began estimating the current and future cost and time required to run certain applications, according to Alan Boehme, SVP, IT strategy and enterprise architecture, at ING Americas, who was quoted in the story. “We looked at: Can we run the jobs faster and give our analysts and others more time to make business decisions, and can we do that at a cost that’s equal to or less than it is today?” he said.

Guess that they found out: A projection that the bank could cut processing time and costs by as much as 50% by using cloud services.

But that savings discovery is just part of the story. After testing cloud computing last year, it applied one of its core applications across several key providers, including Rackspace, Amazon and Salesforce.com. In doing so, the bank moved beyond the simple notion that you have to put all your eggs (data or apps) in one basket (a provider).

And the bank understands that “different parts of ING will be able to take advantage of cloud computing at different rates,” said Boehme, in the article, who estimated that some of the financial institution’s business units will be able to move 50% to 60% of their processing to the cloud depending on the platform, while others may only migrate about 10% of apps and data.

All this is very interesting to read and indicates to me that enterprises — often due to economic necessity — are becoming more and more sophisticated in their understanding of and approach to the cloud. And that is why we at Monitis are seeing heightened interest in third-party monitoring solutions that measure things like cloud platform up time and provide warnings when apps are down.

A heavy book!

What would you rather carry on your back — textbooks or lighter than air apps and data?

When I went to school (six miles each way in the snow and rain, LOL), every year the books got heavier. Now, students can look forward to easy trips home with courses online — brought to them by the cloud. I recently read a commentary that said textbooks met the needs of 19th and 2oth century students, but that they fall short of the needs of today’s interactive students. “They are old-school delivery that supports old-school pedagogy,” the author stated. ” (OK, I must admit, I had to go to Wikipedia to find out what “pedagogy” means.)

Instead, cloud computing is much more appropriate for both students and faculty and staff.  The more schools that adopt the cloud, the more they can replace books — which by the way, have a tendency to get rather stale and outdated fast and cost a lot to replace — with cloud-based content delivery.

We at Monitis have been working with more more schools to help them ensure reliability of content-as-a-service.  But they are going beyond course content. The cloud is settling into ivy-covered walls with such resources as word processors, spreadsheets, databases, data visualization and analysis applications, teacher and administrator tools, and voice/video communications.  Often, much of that is provided online by the likes of Google and Amazon and Rackspace, and that’s why we are seeing big demand from schools for cloud platform monitoring, too.

When I think of all the schools I’ve worked with that are trimming IT budgets and making way for future scalability, boosting services to students, ensuring updated and current course content and making administration more efficient, I am impressed by their faith in the cloud movement. Faith is one thing, but I think that they are also good business moves, and the drivers within institutions–whether they be educators, IT folks or students themselves — are far-sighted and good decision makers.

Everybody wants to improve education and our educational system, but sometimes it takes a little thinking out of the box to make forward strides.

Not Raking in the Dough

I read where UBS, the Swiss banking giant, found that Amazon Web Services (AWS) earns $500 million yearly from its cloud computing business.

While that number may sound impressive to some at first blush, it’s really only around 2% of Amazon.com’s annual revenues. And in the blog I read about this news, that would be less than AWS makes on “garden rakes.”

UBS got its numbers by breaking out a lump sum of Amazon’s quarterly earnings reports that it calls “other” revenue, separate from its retail revenues. “Other” includes Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and other services like packing and shipping goods. On the bright side, UBS predicts that AWS cloud revenue might grow to $2.54 billion by 2014.

So what do these numbers mean to you? On the one hand, $500 million is a tiny fraction of worldwide IT spending — which comes to $365 billion a year right now — so it’s painfully obvious that public cloud computing is a lot smaller market than it’s been made out to be. However, on the other hand, we know that private clouds are preferred right now, as enterprises still have the heeby-geebies about security on public platforms.

So, my take on this is that just because AWS isn’t raking in (forgive the pun) billions of dollars yearly on the cloud right now, it doesn’t mean it won’t someday. After all, it’s built the infrastructure. And you know about that saying: “If you build it they will come.”

The Indian cloud market is now worth about $110 million annually, but a new survey says that could grow by almost 10 times as much to over $1 billion by 2013. Wow; that’s a lot of cloud cash!

The study, called Cloud Computing in India: Opportunities & Way Forward, by Zinnov Management Consulting, says that the Indian cloud computing market, SaaS has seen the most rapid growth until now, and is likely to reach $650 million in sales by 2015, while PaaS and IaaS markets together will reach $434 million each by then.

“This is indeed a perfect storm,” said Pari Natarajan, Chief Executive Officer, Zinnov Management Consulting, in an article I read in The Times of India. “The only difference is that, this storm is destructive only to companies who are not willing to change, while it is a huge opportunity for others.”

Collaborative Applications, CRM, ERP & Email workloads are the dominant apps in Indian cloud computing, according to the article.

I’ve always thought that the emerging economies of the world are the future goldmines of cloud computing, especially as opportunities for further growth in mature markets like the U.S. and Europe scale down a bit. And I believe that someday, homegrown companies in India will provide real competition to today’s mostly Western cloud services providers. Hear that Google?

I know that in my business, as Monitis grows globally and establishes new monitoring stations around the world, our international customer list expands accordingly. I guess my point here is that we in the IT industry often get caught up in our very Western-centric thinking about the cloud, that it’s mostly a trend in developed countries. But nothing could be further from the truth. The cloud, by its very nature, is borderless, and businesses and customers can be found everywhere — in Bombay, Beijing, Berlin and Boston.

I read a paper recently that listed a number of reasons why schools and universities are increasingly relying on their own websites to interact with students and deliver services, such as admissions, enrollment and registration, and other functions.

Those reasons (and I’ll get to them in a minute) make very good sense. But, overall, automation designed to answer students’ questions, helps schools keep staff lean, increases their productivity and boosts service levels to current and prospective students – even as enrollment grows and budgets shrink.

My thoughts: As smart as it seems to employ this kind of technology, it seems even smarter for universities and schools to follow-up with cloud-based monitoring tools to make sure those applications are running efficiently.

OK, now for the rationale for web self-services:

The # 1 reason is that “tech savvy” students can’t tolerate inefficiency. If they can’t find a resource or an answer to their questions on a school’s site, they’ll call or email someone on staff, which incurs extra costs and resources for the school.  Worse, a prospective student may give up and go to another school’s site.

#2 – A poorly designed site with little or no self-service capacity means school staff winds up dealing with the same issues, or answering the same questions constantly – taking up their valuable time. They could be doing some more high-value work.

#3 – The costs of labor-heavy administration means, well, high costs. At Temple University in Philadelphia, the 27th largest university in the U.S., (with 35,000 students), they figured out how much it costs to field all students’ questions each year: 4,000 staff hours per year…the equivalent of three full-time staff.

#4 – Technology such as instant answer agents saves schools money. For example, an interaction with a student via the phone costs $25, while an application doing the same costs $1 per instance.

#5 – Schools can measure the ROI of using technology, as it expands the bottom line. One school mentioned in the paper canceled plans to hire an additional staff of 25 after implementing such technology, saving a lot of money.

As both businesses and schools rely more and more on internet or cloud-based applications to expand efficiencies and savings, it’s also more critical that they keep a close eye on how those tools are working, for example, via website transaction monitoring. Monitoring those solutions is the answer and can provide valuable information on how they perform – allowing enterprises to avoid disaster scenarios, and, if necessary, fix small problems before they become bigger ones.

I couldn’t help but be struck by the announcement from social network Facebook, which operates on the cloud, that it is simplifying and at the same time strengthening its privacy options. What struck me about it was that consumers who use cloud apps (OK, maybe more consumers in Europe than the U.S. care about this.) are just as concerned about protection of data and security as companies are when using cloud- based services. And what struck me even more was that we need industry-wide protections – on both the consumer and corporate side – versus piecemeal patches and changes from service providers, be they big or small.

What happened with Facebook is that, in an effort to give users more privacy options, they came up with a pretty complicated solution. Users had to set privacy settings for each application that they used, for example, whether to share with friends, friends of friends or everyone. Plus, they had to set privacy settings for every new feature that Facebook introduced (hundreds since its founding in 2004).

Now, however, Facebook will give users a single privacy page listing all their applications and giving them a choice of three settings for each. They can also turn off their applications to make sure that no information is shared without consent. And Facebook will suggest defaults.

This sounds like a fine fix to me. Anyway, Facebook does not rely on its 400 million users sharing information in order to sell to advertisers, according to its head Mark Zuckerberg, pictured above (How old is this guy, anyway? He looks like he’s still in college.) 

But some in Europe, which, in general, is really more concerned about privacy and the sharing of information than the U.S., aren’t satisfied. According to a BBC article that I read, some questioned whether the default setting will be for sharing less information. And, the European Commission described the changes as “unacceptable”.

Maybe businesses can take a cue from the effort that Facebook has had to make to reassure users about privacy and security of data on the cloud.  In the absence of global industry-wide standards and protections, thousands of companies, government agencies and educational institutions migrating to the cloud are employing 24/7 monitoring of their apps, servers, networks, websites, cloud platforms and more.

It’s better to be safe than sorry.

Enomaly Inc. founder and CTO Reuven Cohen recently spent some time in China, and he discovered that cloud isn’t just hype there. It’s gone into active overdrive.

I was reading his company blog, and I was fascinated with the Chinese approach to making cloud computing available to the masses – something Cohen refers to as Communal Clouds. It reminded me of the drive in the U.S. to get phone service established in cities and towns and wild places alike.

Communal Clouds are cloud infrastructures within China’s Special Economic Zones (SEZs) created by the government. SEZs are granted flexible tax privileges and other special policies, allowing businesses within the zones to prosper and do business more freely than in the rest of China. Many companies within these zones now feature their own on-site data centers. And the clouds – some of which are state-sponsored – give computing platforms to companies at little or no cost.

This is a great approach to stimulating economic growth. While the U.S. government has been active in setting up and perfecting its own cloud computing infrastructure, wouldn’t it be great if the government embarked on its own campaign of setting up sponsored cloud computing platforms for private businesses – especially growing firms?

This, in turn, would inspire more investment and business growth. And U.S. companies entrusting their data and applications on the cloud would be encouraged to invest in more cloud services, such as transaction or service level monitoring.

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Maybe you didn’t hear about it, but earlier this month University of California Davis ended its pilot of Google Apps for 30,000 faculty and students before a full rollout was to commence because it was concerned about the privacy of data in emails. Apparently, UC Davis CIO Peter Siegel sent a note to employees explaining that faculty “…expressed concerns that our campus’ commitment to protecting the privacy of their communications is not demonstrated by Google and that the appropriate safeguards are neither in place at this time nor planned for in the near future,” according to excerpts printed in InformationWeek.

Despite UC Davis’s decision, Google is celebrating a milestone. As of today, it has 8 million students, faculty and staff at educational institutions globally using Google Apps. (In total, 25 million use Google Apps; so the educational piece of the pie is considerable!) Google is adding muscle to its efforts to sign up educational institutions to use Google Apps, even launching a new site for recruiting schools.

So far, thousands of schools and millions of students are using Google Apps Education, and some of the more famous include:

• Morehouse,
• University of Rhode Island,
• University of Nevada Las Vegas,
• Metropolitan State College of Denver
• North Carolina State University.

Yet, as the UC Davis incident shows, institutions still must be convinced that their data is private and safe – especially the content of emails. It’s not an easy task for cloud services providers, nor for Google, especially, which examines email content to sell advertising.

Yet, for many students, I’d venture to guess that they’re more interested in a constant flow of new bells and whistles added to their productivity suite (like Google’s recent addition of document collaboration) than worry about data privacy. If they’re emailing each other about girls or guys, do you think they’d mind a well-placed ad from a dating service?

Still, as I’ve said many times in this blog, prevention is the best medicine out there. And if you’re in love with cloud apps but still have doubts about performance, cloud monitoring services are the answer. You get an independent watchdog to alert you on a variety of metrics – and in a variety of ways, from phone to email to texting and Twitter.

I’ve previously written about IBM’s cloud platform, and how Panasonic will use the LotusLive solution for web conferencing, file sharing, project management and instant messaging.  In addition, Panasonic will also use LotusLive for social networking between employees, partners and supplier.

Now comes the news that Panasonic will also start using Oracle’s cloud computing service at Panasonic Factory Solutions Co’s plants in Japan, China and elsewhere – coming this fall, says an article on the development.

The Panasonic unit – which runs five plants – now spends several hundred million yen yearly on its own, internal IT computing system, and as a result of the switch to Oracle’s cloud service, the company expects to shave 40% off that bill.

Again, this is another great example of how the Cloud is saving companies money in IT expenditures. But it also highlights the higher stakes that companies incur by entrusting their data and apps to an outside party.

In such cases, firms need to closely monitor their service level agreements (SLAs) with cloud providers in order to ensure the agreed-upon service thresholds are met. I can think of many ways that monitoring is valuable when an enterprise migrates, but one very smart strategy is monitoring app performance.

You don’t have to be the size of Panasonic to enjoy the Cloud, but you can make sure you’re protected like a giant with monitoring services.