Stop stressing and learn to love The Cloud! That's the underlying message from JP Rangaswami, managing director of BT Design, who notes that the companies that are leading the Cloud movement now were the ones that were ready to take the risks ten years ago.
“Think of two companies that were start ups at that time who decided they were ready for scale. Think of Google and Amazon who said they were ready for scale,” notes Rangaswami. “Ten years on, every mention today has Google and Amazon in it. If we were at an on demand computing Service Orientated Architecture web conference in 1997 we would have heard the same thing except that while we were hearing it, Google and Amazon were busy building to become what they are today.
“While we pretend that Cloud is not happening, while we bring up all the excuses of security, latency, governance models, private or public, while we do all this there are companies that are the new Googles and the new Amazons that are building up.”
But he concedes there is a lot hype and fuss around The Cloud that is not necessarily helpful. “Where I come from, the most common phrase that I associate with Cloud is cuckoo land. The question is therefore: are the people who think The Cloud exists in cloud cuckoo land? Or are the people who think that The Cloud doesn’t exist in cloud cuckoo land?” he asks.
“The word or phrase Cloud Computing appears to bring up as many definitions and as many argument as you’d almost think that all the people who said they were experts on the year 2000 had now congregated after passing through Green computing. The new buzz phrase is Cloud Computing. Everyone has landed up there and it is what you want it to be.
“The Cloud is a bit like Web 2.0. It's a buzz phrase that represents many things to many people. I was told Web 2.0 was really insecure, it leaks. Do you know photographs of your bottom taken on the photocopier are now available on the internet, and how dare you put it there and you know everyone can read it. Before that I was told the same of Web 1.0 was leaky – but you know when I looked around for when I have lost data – whether its credit card details social security details, records, it has nothing to do with the web. We just like pointing out weaknesses and inefficiencies of what we are scared of.
“In the world we live in we don’t have control of our data centres. There are many many things we don’t have control of, but to turn around and say that in this new world that’s coming, you can’t do that because you don’t have control. Well the Googles and Amazons didn’t care about it ten years ago and their equivalents today who are going to eat the lunch of every business today, aren’t worrying about it. They are busy building completely new business models, they are going to exploit the value.”
Defining The Cloud
Rangaswami chooses to turn to the definition of The Cloud set out by research firm Gartner Group. “The Cloud is a service. It is scalable and elastic. It is multi-tenanted. It is based on open standards,” he says. “It is reasonably common to say that characteristics of cloud are service, scalable and elastic. People use the term elastic to say you can go down as well as up. If you imagine that the precursors of all four of these were actually around 10 years ago you could say that some understanding of building businesses on a service model has been around for a very long time.
“We had the idea of some form of the compute grids and grid servers and the on-demand model. The System38 had been reborn in three or four guises into a form where people were talking about on demand computing. The utility based model had come in and the internet had arrived. The idea of shared services through some kind of shared centre had been around for a while, but we had IT departments saying they were not ready for scale.
“Sometimes we start sounding like the US motor industry because our ability to look into the future is so much constrained by looking into rear view mirror that we start making decisions about how to take the brown field we are in and implement the Cloud. That doesn’t mean that I don’t expect a hybrid model or that I don’t expect to see legacy architectures continue. That's like saying paper will disappear. A paperless office is as unlikely as a paperless loo! We will continue to have hybrid models.”
But it's not all about Google and Amazon; there are new Cloud contenders. “When I try to explain to people what The Cloud represents there is no point without explaining Animoto, a start up, that could move from 25,000 to 250,000 subscribers over a matter of 3 days,” says Rangaswami. “They started with a very simple business model. They said give us your photographs and give us the music you like and we will make a video out of it and play it back to you in seconds flat.
“So you had motion associated with your image and with the music you wanted. These guys weren’t talking about what government's model to use, or security issues, or whether there are critical business processes that cant possibly be outside their site. They didn’t worry about any of these things. What they did was take EC2 and right scale on top of it. They managed to scale up from 25000 to 250000 subscribers and from 50 instances to instances to 3500 instances of servers in that 3 day period. That required them to be architected to operate differently.”
The Cloud Generation
The shift to Cloud Computing also has generational and demographic implications. “The people who are going to be using The Cloud are the millennia generation,” suggests Rangaswami. “They are born using The Cloud. They wouldn’t know what the word governance meant. Their idea of privacy is completely different from ours, their idea of security and confidentiality is completely different from ours. This new generation when they enter the workplace, they think Cloud naturally. They build businesses on it.
“New youth that is coming through have different values. A generation of users that have a different values are making decisions that don’t involve our bias. All of this is happening in an environment where Capex has become Opex. The opportunity size is absolutely huge, but it is done not by arguing whether something is private or public or whether it is secure or in the right place, or whether we’ve got the right governance models or whether the pricing works.
“I promise you Jeff Besos did not spend any time in 1996 going through those questions as they built what they built up, and Brin and Page were not sitting round answering these questions as they built Google up. So we are contemplating our navel and picking different coloured lint out of it. There is a lot of money to be made, there are a lot of opportunities and there are many businesses which I do not expect to see disappear.”
He concludes: “A much discredited economist who I have a lot of time for, George Gilder said every economic error is characterised by some abundances and some scarcities; a business which can take advantage of both will win. We have to get used to the fact that Cloud Computing represents abundance and if you don’t take some form of leverage out of that abundance you are going to lose, because everyone else will.”
