By Dan Kusnetzky published: Wednesday, September 10 2008
We're all hearing quite a bit of media chatter about "cloud computing." Sometimes suppliers may use other terms such as "Mesh computing" or "Elastic Cloud Computing." All of these terms really boil down to an old idea being implemented using new technology - advanced networking technology combined with sophisticated virtualization technology. In the past, suppliers used terms such as "service bureaus" or "application service providers" to put forward the idea that applications be rewritten using new tools and then have them hosted somewhere on the Internet or in the organization's own datacenter. Other times, the real story is just making all of an organization's new applications Web-based so that it no long matters where the application is running or what type of client system is being used to access it.
Some of the strongest and loudest proponents of this approach are suppliers of hosting services and software for development and deployment that are hoping to sell products and services to organizations worldwide. Their throw-everything-away-and-start-over-with-our-products approach promises lower costs, higher levels of reliability and availability and often doesn't mention that this idea has been tried again and again in the history of computing only to have organizations take back some or all of their processing due to concerns about security, privacy, performance or cost.
Organizations are clearly moving in this direction one application at a time on their own as new applications are developed. They're choosing to support Web-based user interfaces rather than using custom or proprietary client software. They're just looking for ways to integrate the concept of cloud computing into their IT infrastructure, when and where it fits, not allow some supplier to insist that they change what they're doing to fit into their infrastructure. In the end, organizations are going to "own" their own cloud even of portions or, perhaps, all of it are hosted on external systems.
While "Cloud Computing" is the newest catch phrase, it's important to remember that organizations are deliberately adopting more general, lower cost, highly interoperable technologies that make it possible for them to choose to use external services or systems.
Different Roles
Suppliers of IT technology and the consumers of that technology play different roles and are driven by different needs. This often results in the announcement of new technological approaches long before some organizations are ready to adopt that technology. After all, that new technology may not meet the current needs of an organization.
The Role Played by Suppliers
Suppliers develop new technology (systems and software) and methods while they maintain current technology and methods. Their goal is to keep customers satisfied with how the technology supports the needs of the organization up until it is time to convince them that the technology that's supporting their business is now obsolete and could not possibly do what's needed to take them into the future.
Suppliers hope to find a way to keep the customer paying for upgrades, hosting services, consulting and technical support. They also hope to convince the IT decision-makers that only their products can solve today's problems when the truth is more along the lines that many products can do what is needed.
Accomplishing these goals are, of course, quite difficult when the current technology is "good enough" and may be working quite well. The suppliers do their best to cast established systems as "legacy systems" and speak about them as if they were a problem rather than today's solution to today's problems.
