Dilbert on Cloud Computing

How Information Technology Can Rise On The Cloud

On the Cloud Computing Google Group, Ray DePena posted a link to a news article and launched a new discussion thread by asking this intriguing question.

Do you share this view or have a different perspective?

Cloud to suck money out of market, report says
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10394966-16.html

"A recent survey suggests that CIOs are loosening the purse strings on
IT spending. IT vendors may want to hold off their celebrations,
though, because much of the spending appears to be headed for
deflationary forces like cloud computing, virtualization, and their
kissing cousin, open source.

An economic rebound never looked so dire."

I replied:

Economically, increased efficiency increases economic growth. If this weren't true, then we'd all be wearing one of our 3 pairs of clothes as we worked 12 hours a day on our farms doing chores.

IT has always increased efficiency, lowering costs, thereby increasing productivity, both within itself and in the business it serves. This has been its primary role; and yet, IT is still here, with a budget.

Years ago, there was a lot of concern about jobs that would be lost because of programming and other automation. Yet, this proved to reallocate resources, as it frees up time, permitting companies to be more competitive and utilize its human resources better. There is an insatiable demand for increase productivity. Yes, it can lead to structural changes due to skill set requirements changing. Overall, though, it proved to be fuel for growth, leading to very low unemployment during the 1990s.

It is a different question to ask whether or not the individual can continue to add value with their newly freed up time. Ditto for skill classifications. Can farming continue to produce value to the overall economy and society? Over time, there can be shifts that reduce the investment in one basket to increase another. As a % of GDP, farming has certainly dwindled, primarily because per worker productivity has grown dramatically over the past 100 years. Yet, due to per farmer productivity being so high, food production continues to increase, as we sell to the world. Ultimately, freeing up human resources from farming has permitted us to produce other things, like cell phones and computers.

It is not clear if IT is about to become less relevant in the decade ahead (read "decreased budget"). Business units can increasingly purchase technological solutions without the IT department being in the middle. If this is happening because of increased efficiency, it is a very good thing for the growth. Just like the previous three decades, this efficiency could indirectly be good for IT. It isn't clear yet whether or not IT is ready to become less relevant, continue to be important, or perhaps become even more important through transformed purpose.

To the extent IT can control its fate in this matter, the one thing it can do to accelerate its own demise is oppose efficiency. That is like trying to route traffic down your two lane side street because you are afraid of losing traffic to the new bigger street. It will become a bottleneck. People will figure it out and communicate it to each other. They'll jump on the bigger road that you don't control.

The best thing IT can do to increase its importance in the decade ahead is to continue to add value to the businesses it serves, decreasing costs and increasing capability, perhaps driving cloud computing and other improvements, looking for ways to increase business value with these new capabilities. At the same time, it can try to take on new responsibilities to replace the ones that no longer require as much funding, improving online customer communication and global internal collaboration, for instance.

IT has an opportunity to increase its role in business strategy and innovation. It can help drive growth, rather than just increase the productivity of those who normally drive it. It can play a better role as a business partner, and a stakeholder in the company's success, rather than just a back-end producer. This has been evidenced in the financial industry, where innovation and new products such as derivatives are created by information systems, a new level from just processing account information and basic transactions.

Comparing Force.com, Google Apps Engine and Amazon WS

These are often referred to as the primary vendors in cloud computing today. Yet, the differences between these cloud offerings are broad. For instance, with Force.com, the learning curve of a proprietary language to develop with their Platform as a Service (Paas) is minor for a Java developer as it is very similar to Java. The real issue is the lack of re-usable libraries. In the Java community, there is a lot of open source, such as XML libraries from Apache (e.g., digester). Without this, you have to reinvent the wheel instead of rapidly producing the business logic you need. This, IMHO, is a very large hidden cost of their PaaS and one reason their development community isn't taking off like a rocket.

The real appeal of Force.com is high productivity for creating data entry, reporting and analysis apps, much of which can be accomplished without programming. They also have decent licensing options for organizations that need an enterprise capable application infrastructure without the data center or software maintenance costs.

Google Apps Engine (GAE) is attractive to Java developers. If you look at the Java Google Group (2765) count, they far outnumber Python users (802).

One advantage of their Java platform is portability. That is, an app created for GAE can be hosted on any Java EE server, as they provide a subset of Java EE standards, open standards within the Java community. The catch is you have to avoid their hooks; or at least consider how to minimize your rip-and-replace costs. One potential hook can be in the use of Google Accounts for authentication. They are also producing APIs into their infrastructure for things like task queues that might not be so portable to a non-GAE Java EE environment.

The key here is to push to ensure that all their APIs follow open standards within the Java community. If such standards don't exist, then now may be the time to create them via the Java Community Process (JCP.org). One example of Google doing this right, in addition to supporting a subset of Java EE standards, is JCache (JSR-107). Although they implement it with their memcache, the open standards interface protects your code from this, allowing you to swap to an open source implementation if you move your app to another Java hosting environment. It is clear that Google went far to support Java Community Process standards. However, Google is also creating APIs for their services that don't have JCP interfaces. As long as Google proprietary APIs are coupled with a drive to create new JCP standards to complete these gaps, then one could settle for near-term limited rip-and-replace risk with an overall and long-term benefit of open standards.

Amazon's "you can do anything in your VM" approach sounds good; but can be a lot more costly if you don't need Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Even with cloud computing, your minimum costs can really add up on a monthly basis when you do the math, particularly if you consume a lot of bandwidth. Your IT costs can be higher for this freedom as well as you'll have to support software configuration and maintenance. It is, in a nut shell, a different cost model for hosting with the added benefit of elasticity for those with high growth rates or dynamic demand and a need for application hosting, security or SLA requirements not met via current PaaS providers. Your platform options are more flexible. Yet, this equation includes a lot more than just platform, and may be more flexible than you need, translating to unnecessary cost. On the other hand, if you are moving exiting apps to it, have requirements that PaaS providers aren't providing, or need data center disaster recovery, then this can be your preferred choice.

In the end, Force.com, GAE and Amazon are apples and oranges today. One isn't better than the other because they are very different; so different, it could make sense to combine them all.

Erik Sliman
OpenStandards.net