CLOUD_Analysis...The basics for beginners
to Mobile Device Brokering & Liquidation
By Peter J. Jerico, USA Cloud Development Group, New York, March 17th 2010
1. Large
enterprises are building their own private clouds. IBM, for instance, announced its “Blue Cloud” initiative
two years ago. The company has already built 13 massive datacenters around the world and is adding more every quarter. Private
cloud services are run in datacenters managed by third parties such as Amazon.com, but also in private datacenters on company
property managed by corporate IT staffs. Private clouds address the security concerns of large enterprises. They're scalable,
growing and shrinking as needed. They're also managed centrally in a special cloud.
2. Cloud computing will shift the skills needed by IT workers. It's no longer enough for
a CIO to oversee rollouts, integrations and development projects. Instead, IT professionals need to focus on extracting the
most business value from new technologies. Cloud computing helps them shed the burdens of technological implementation and
concentrate on business processes. At the staffer level, coding and development skills will take a back seat to project management,
quality assurance testing, business analysis and other high-level abstract thinking.
3. IT departments
will shrink as users go directly to the cloud for IT resources. In his book, "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World,
From Edison to Google" (W.W. Norton, 2008), Nicholas Carr all but declares the pending death of IT. “In the long
run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least in its familiar form,” he writes. “It will have little
left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into ‘the cloud.’ Business
units and even individual employees will be able to control the processing of information directly, without the need for legions
of technical specialists.”
4. Concerns about information security will abate as CIOs “get”
the cloud paradigm. The idea of storing critical business data on a third-party server to which multiple “tenants”
have access seems inherently insecure. Better to keep that data in house, many IT professionals think. But what CFO keeps
the corporate treasury locked in a safe in his office? Banks store everyone’s money together and people go in and out
of banks all day long, knowing they're safer places to keep money than under mattresses. It's security procedures that matter,
not physical walls between deposits of data.
5. Professional services will be bundled with commodity cloud
services. Today, cloud computing is just another way to pay for hardware and software. But a few SaaS people partnering with professional services firms to
provide expertise that makes applications actually useful. Salesforce.com’s Successforce services let customers connect
with either a Salesforce consultant or one of the company’s partners, such as Accenture or Deloitte. NetSuite allows
its professional services partners to implement its services as software that is provided on-demand to NetSuite clients. H&R
Block’s Tango consumer online tax-preparation service, for $70, includes unlimited round-the-clock access to tax experts.
Tomorrow’s cloud will contain human intelligence as well as computational power.
6. SMBs, as well
as large enterprises, will be run on the cloud. Vendors such as NetSuite are leasing all the computing power and
applications that SMBs need, such as Microsoft’s Great Plains software, for far less than the cost of acquiring and
implementing all the hardware, software and personnel required to run Great Plains in-house.
7. Cloud-computing
resources will become more customizable. Today, the paradigm of cloud computing is its implementation of best practices
in standard ways. But that limits cloud computing to common-ground applications such as CRM. Extremely complex custom applications that provide competitive
advantage, such as a travel reservation system, can’t be implemented on a cloud’s paradoxically flexible yet rigid
platform. In the future, though, cloud-computing vendors will make their applications more customizable by end users. Then
corporations will move mission-critical unique applications into the cloud.
8. Large enterprises will become
part-time cloud-computing vendors. Enterprises are maintaining huge IT infrastructures, often with excess capacity.
To unlock the value in that investment, corporate IT departments will create clouds within their IT infrastructure and lease
cloud power to suppliers and customers. This is exactly what Amazon.com is doing with its S3 and Elastic Compute Cloud initiatives.
There is no reason General Motors and Target can’t do that too.
9. Cloud computing will unleash innovation.
Local constraints on energy costs and capacities; space requirements for IT infrastructure; and up-front costs will
disappear as companies become able to tap computing resources situated anywhere on the planet. A datacenter parked next to
a hydroelectric dam — perhaps also owned by the datacenter — will be cheaper and more reliable than one in midtown
Manhattan. Transformational IT projects that were stalled by localized constraints will move forward.
10.
The browser will be all the desktop software you need. Local applications will become passé and PCs will become
slimmer, more agile gateways to the cloud where the heavy lifting is done. Client-server computing will return under a new
name.
AND MOBILE BROKERS
WILL MAKE A FORTUNE!
