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“It may well be that cloud computing turns out to be simply a competitive necessity. It may not provide anybody a competitive advantage in the long run.”

“But if it provides a more efficient means of computing, which I think it does, everyone will move into the cloud, just as everyone moved on to the electric grid. In the end is what you plug into a utility system that is interesting, not the system itself.”

Read Nick Carr’s “The Big Switch, Rewiring the World From Edison to Google.”

At Cloud Slam 2009 Songnian Zhou introduced “cloud computing” as the third generation of IT, Information Technologies: mainframes and centralized computing were all the rage in the 70s and client-server architectures in the 90s.

So, building upon Songnian’s talk, I would think that this early in the XXI century we are:

1. distributing processing power and storage capacity by applying grid computing to public and private clouds;
2. sharing everything by means of VM, virtual machines, that enable infrastructure sharing;
3. mixing services in the form of mash-ups that blend data and applications to create new ones;
4. relying more and more on ubiquitous broadband access to leverage high speed connections to the Internet;
5. making mobility be the next big thing.

As an example, Cloud Slam 2009 is a conference delivered from the so-called “cloud.” Basically, this means that I’m “virtually” attending this event over the Internet by just using my laptop:

• The below collage illustrates (1) WebEx’s event manager, which enables participants to follow the presentations online; it also provides some degree of interaction by enabling us to text questions.
• While clicking on the above picture will take you to Cloud Slam’s website, circles 2-4 (below ) show that the event organizers leverage social networking tools such as: facebook, linkedin and twitter to promote the event and further engage the audience.

By the way, Cloud Slam’s site could be an example of web 1.0 as most information shown there is static while these other participatory services  involve two way interactions (including this blog) which are quite representative of the 2.0 generation , and all (1.0 and 2.0) happen to be hosted and updated by the “cloud” which minimizes the need for new software to be installed in your computer.

Most of those crafting online conferences claim the benefits from incurring a much lower carbon footprint when compared with making people physically go to different sites. It should be noted that the ICT industry consumes vast amounts of power though. Nonetheless, vendors and service providers are taking steps to lower the bill by reducing their clouds’ growing thirst for electricity and are tapping into renewable sources of energy.

There is also the benefit of enabling everyone to be more productive: participants are not locked in a single room and do not have to travel. A number of today’s 2.0 applications happen to be online collaboration tools enabled by cloud computing infrastructure of large scale. This means thousands of servers in regional and global data centers.

So, one would think that by tapping into participatory services (such as the ones listed above) the organizers of Cloud Slam 2009 are enabling attendees to engage in public discourse as well as facilitating the development of a community of interest.

By the way, when looking for past references, one of the speakers at eComm 2009 (see links below)  talked about  some telecommunication offerings as a kind of precursors of today’s cloud computing. More specifically, he mentioned:

• the role of IN, intelligent networks, delivering telephony features such as call screening, toll free calling, and centrex services (virtual PBX for the enterprise) to name a few services handled by servers which do not require new devices or changes to the users’ existing phones;
• MVNO, mobile virtual network operators, a model by which telcos make available their infrastructure for other providers (the MVNOs) to deliver a full range of services to end users, this seeing as the equivalent to IaaS, infrastructure as a service, in cloud computing terms.

I’m now going back to Cloud Slam. My next posts will discuss cloud computing models such as IaaS, infrastructure as a service, Paas, platform as a service, and SaaS, software as a service. In the meantime, I welcome your comments and emails.

J. de Francisco blogging from Chicago, April 20

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Other posts of interest:

• eComm 2009 (1); (2); (3)
• 2.0 companies leverage 2.0 technologies
• open cloud manifesto