October 29, 2012
Volume XLI, Issue 6
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 Is Coming Soon
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 (CCW:2012) will take place from Thursday morning November 8th through mid-day Friday November 9th at the Doubletree Suites by Hilton Hotel in Santa Monica, CA.
As the first joint activity of the Cloud Computing Association (CCA) and the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), CCW:2012 will feature three co-located conferences focusing on the impact of cloud-based solutions in the industry's fastest-moving and most strategically important areas: entertainment, broadband, and venture financing.
The DCIA is especially grateful to CCW:2012 Gold Sponsors Aspera, DataDirect Networks, Extreme Reach, Oracle, and SAP; and Silver Sponsors CSC Leasing Company, i3m3 Solutions, Kaltura, Scayl, Sequencia, and Unicorn Media for making it possible to extend an extremely attractive offer to DCIA Member Companies for this inaugural event.
In lieu of the normal delegate registration fee for CCW:2012, with the sunset cruise reception an add-on option; these sponsors have made financial contributions enabling DCIA Members to attend the entire summit (including general sessions and luncheon, its three co-located conferences and breaks, as well as all exhibits and roundtables) and the cruise at a very affordable cost.
This offer will probably sell-out the event, and will certainly take-up the remaining spaces on the cruise — so if you'd like to attend CCW:2012, please don't wait: register now.
CCW:2012 registration enables delegates to participate in any session of the three conferences being presented at CCW:2012 — ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT DELIVERY, BROADBAND NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE, and INVESTING IN THE CLOUD.
The CCA is an independent membership organization, founded in 2012, dedicated to building a community of end-users and service providers of cloud-based solutions and products through individual professional memberships and industry conferences. The CCA has quickly amassed a contact list of three-hundred thousand industry participants.
The DCIA is an international trade organization, established in 2003, with more than one-hundred industry-leading member companies, including software developers, broadband network operators, and content providers. The DCIA conducts working groups, oversees advocacy initiatives, and publishes the weekly online newsletter DCINFO.
Don't Miss CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 (CCW:2012) will feature three co-located conferences that will explore the impact of "the cloud" on entertainment, broadband, and venture financing.
The first joint activity of the Cloud Computing Association (CCA) and the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), CCW:2012 will take place at the Doubletree Suites by Hilton Hotel in Santa Monica, CA on Thursday November 8th and Friday November 9th.
Thank you to Gold Sponsors Aspera, DataDirect Networks, Extreme Reach, Oracle, and SAP; and Silver Sponsors CSC Leasing Company, i3m3 Solutions, Kaltura, Scayl, Sequencia, and Unicorn Media for making it possible to extend an extremely attractive offer to DCIA Member Companies for this inaugural event.
In lieu of the normal delegate registration fee for CCW:2012, with the sunset cruise reception an add-on option; these companies are enabling DCIA Members to attend the entire summit (including general sessions and luncheon, its three co-located conferences and breaks, as well as all exhibits and roundtables) and the cruise at a very affordable cost.
This offer will probably sell-out the event, and will certainly take-up the remaining spaces on the cruise — so if you'd like to attend CCW:2012, please register now.
CCW:2012 registration enables delegates to participate in any session of the three conferences being presented at CCW:2012 — ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT DELIVERY, BROADBAND NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE, and INVESTING IN THE CLOUD.
The CCA is an independent membership organization, founded in 2012, dedicated to building a community of end-users and service providers of cloud-based solutions and products through individual professional memberships and industry conferences. The CCA has quickly amassed a contact list of three-hundred thousand industry participants.
The DCIA is an international trade organization, established in 2003, with more than one-hundred industry-leading member companies, including software developers, broadband network operators, and content providers. The DCIA conducts working groups, oversees advocacy initiatives, and publishes the weekly online newsletter DCINFO.
Frankenstorm Puts Cloud Computing to the Test
Excerpted from IT Business Edge Report by Mike Vizard
They say it's truly an ill wind that doesn't blow somebody some good. In the case of Hurricane Sandy, that someone is likely to be a cloud service provider.
With roughly five days of warning, the east coast is preparing for what is being described as "Frankenstorm," a rare late season hurricane that is expected to collide next week with a cold front loaded with snow over some of the most populous regions of the United States. Of course, where there are people there are lots of businesses, the majority of which probably don't have much in the way of a functioning backup and recovery plan in place.
With enough warning, however, many of them now have the opportunity to contact a cloud service provider for help. The question is, what level of service are they going to need? Most of them have probably heard of Amazon and Google. But those companies are faceless entities in the cloud. Most small businesses are going to be looking for a little more in the way of hand holding to get them through next week. For example, not many of them really know the difference between backing up data and actually being able to stay online by firing up their entire stack of applications on remote virtual servers in a matter a minutes.
Providing that level of "virtual IT support" is where smaller cloud service providers expect to thrive. Aaron Hollobaugh, the Vice President of Marketing for Hostway, a provider of cloud computing and hosting services, says it's those kinds of high-touch services that will ultimately differentiate smaller cloud service providers from the Amazons of the world. While Amazon may be able to offer inexpensive compute capacity, when you add up all the total costs in the cloud, smaller companies can be quite price-competitive with Amazon. Add the service quotient to that equation and it's not too long before smaller companies begin to appreciate the value provided by a smaller cloud service provider.
Similarly, Jeff Uphues, Vice President of Cloud Server for Inbound and Outbound Telesales at cloud service provider Cbeyond, says the most important thing IT organizations need to think about is vetting which applications can actually run in the cloud. They also need to make sure they don't find themselves locked into one cloud provider because of all the custom scripts that provider wraps around their application, especially when in most scenarios that application is going to be running across a hybrid cloud computing environment.
The bad news, of course, is that a lot of businesses don't have much time to figure all this out. The good news is that, for once, there is something they can still actually do before a major storm actually hits.
Where Is Cloud Computing Heading in 2013?
Excerpted from CIO Report by Rebecca Merrett
Analysts have predicted a trend towards moving IT from on-premise to off-premise, new cloud applications and an increase in spending on cloud services next year.
IDC Head of Research Matthew Oostveen said with cloud computing maturing this year, more organizations will start to move their IT infrastructure from on-premise to off-premise.
"2012 was the year that we all got tired of cloud — there's cloud fatigue. But with Australia being the country that rapidly takes up technology, I think we have reached a period of maturity with the way that we view cloud," he said.
"What is certain is we are watching a migration taking place where on-premise computing is moving to off-premise computing. It may start incrementally where we see an uptake of co-location services, and obviously the co-locations services are being supported by the influx of new data centers in the marketplace provided by NextDC and Macquarie Telecom, which has built new facilities as well."
Telsyte Senior Analyst Rodney Gedda's predictions are similar to Oostveen's. "Cloud computing services will mature next year and continue to be procured as a replacement to on-premise infrastructure and as an option for service delivery," Gedda said.
He said there will be more innovation in application testing and development in 2013, with new cloud applications coming out to market.
"We can expect to see new types of applications delivered out of the cloud, more options for where data is hosted (and the type of infrastructure it's hosted on) and more services offering 'enterprise-grade' application hosting."
We can also expect to see "very strong" enterprise grade services coming out to market, according to Deloitte Consulting Technology Leader Robert Hillard. "File sharing, document sharing, collaboration will very quickly gain enterprise strength and much greater support within the enterprise traditional governance," he said.
Gartner Vice President Rolf Jester forecasts total cloud spending in Australia for the coming year is to grow to 22 per cent to just over $3 billion.
"A large part of that is in business-process-as-a-service (BPaaS), a lot of it in advertising services. Spending on software-as-a-service (SaaS) will also grow by 28 per cent to over $470 million. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) will reach $385 million, growing by 55 per cent," he said.
He also predicts that in 2014 "40 per cent of enterprises will make the proof of independent security testing a precondition for using any type of cloud services. This is an increase from
fewer than 1 per cent today."
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 As we mark the two-week countdown to CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 (CCW:2012), the DCIA and CCA cordially invite all DCINFO readers to register now for what promises to be an enormously stimulating and valuable event.
Our OPENING PLENARY SESSION will begin with a keynote by Geng Lin, CTO of the Networking Business at Dell, who will introduce three central themes — how are cloud-based solutions in the entertainment sector evolving; how do these and related developments impact broadband network infrastructure; and how should investing in this space be evaluated?
Panelists Michelle Munson, CEO, President, and Co-Founder of Aspera; William Whelpley, Manager of Cloud Services at IBM Global Services; and Robert Stevenson, Chief Business Officer and EVP of Strategy at Gaikai will then probe these questions in more detail.
At ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT DELIVERY, keynoter Eric Quanstrom of Sorenson Media will examine the latest trends in cloud solutions for high-value content production and distribution. Then a panel with Extreme Reach's Dan Brackett, Slacker's Jim Cady, Kaltura's Russell Zack, TransLattice's Robert Geiger, Meteor Entertainment's Sarah Novotny, GenosTV's Mike West, will analyze the newest cloud offerings for entertainment, and the industry's direction in terms of adopting them.
At BROADBAND NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE, keynoter David Sterling of i3m3 Solutions will explore current impacts of cloud migration on broadband network operations and businesses. Then a panel with Altman Vilandrie's Stefan Bewley, Hurricane Electric's Owen DeLong, Integrated Media Technologies' Bruce Lyon, Trend Micro's Bill McGee, CSG Systems' Monica Ricci, and PricewaterhouseCooper's Jeff Sage will analyze network resource usage by data centers and new ISP cloud services.
Meanwhile at INVESTING IN THE CLOUD, keynoter Ketan Patel of New Venture Partners will offer fresh updates on venture capital and M&A activity in the cloud computing space. And the follow-on panel with CSC Leasing's Matt Thompson, Cisco Systems' Bill Williams, MD Capital Advisors' Derek Cahill will analyze the latest trends in capital structuring and strategic alliances for cloud computing firms.
At our conference luncheon, author Bill Williams will discuss and sign copies of The Economics of Cloud Computing, his book that's become required-reading for industry participants. Our next keynote by Jim Burger, Member of Dow Lohnes, will outline key pitfalls to avoid in adopting cloud solutions.
Then a panel with Radio Mitre's Guillermo Chialvo, American Standard Television's Francesco Fabbrocino, Verizon FiOS's Jason Henderson, Chyron's Todd Martin, DigiRamp's Peter Rafelson, and Peer Media's Rajan Samtani will analyze problem areas now affecting cloud adoption in the entertainment sector.
Another panel with Attend's Chuck Stormon, Yale University's Richard Yang, and Huawei's Ning Zong will analyze problem areas for ISPs created by the proliferation of cloud computing.
And a third panel with Edwards Wildman Palmer's Lawrence Freedman, Dynamic Synergy's Mark Landay, and Moses & Singer's Dov Scherzer will analyze problem areas affecting investments, acquisitions, and mergers involving cloud services.
From there, a series of very focused ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT DELIVERY keynotes by Mark Davis of Scenios, Dave Toole of MEDIAMobz, Stephen White of Gracenote, and John Schiela of Phoenix Marketing International will highlight current developments in cloud collaboration, cloud dailies, cloud metadata, and cloud pilots.
NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE keynotes by Bill Sewell of Wiredrive, Bill Kallman of Scayl, Prabhat Kumar of i3m3 Solutions, Julian Lovelock of HID Global Identity Assurance, and Doug Natal of Oracle will examine third-party SaaS, third-party PaaS, third-party IaaS, security, and interconnection.
And INVESTING IN THE CLOUD keynotes by Peter Siwinski of Cumulus Venture Partners, Chris Haddad of WSO2, Ajay Malhotra of Prime Focus Technologies, Sean Jennings of Virtustream, Ann Greenberg of Sceneplay will explore public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds, virtual private clouds, and community clouds.
Finally, we'll come back together for the day-one closing plenary session with Shahi Ghanem, EVP of Strategy at BitTorrent, and Jeff Wheeler, Distinguished Engineer and Technical Leader of Cloud Management at Huawei summarizing all that we've covered regarding benefits and drawbacks of cloud computing for entertainment, infrastructure, and venture financing.
After this very full day, we'll bus from the Santa Monica conference venue to Marina del Rey for a relaxing cruise and networking cocktail reception aboard a yacht.
We'll start Friday with a continental breakfast and exhibition hall activities, after which attendees may resume or change their selection of topical break-out sessions.
At ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT DELIVERY, a series of very-focused keynotes by Matt Johnson of Unicorn Media, Brian Campanotti of Front Porch Digital, Greg Wiley of Media Science International, Scott Campbell of SAP America, and Joey Jablonski of DataDirect Networks will explore cloud transcoding, cloud storage, cloud delivery, cloud data, and cloud analytics.
Meanwhile, at NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE, keynotes by Jean-Luc Chatelain of DataDirect Networks, Linda Senigaglia of Navigation Solutions, Ryan Walters of Philotek, Tim Cavanaugh of Cavanaugh Consulting, and Daniel Kenyon of Equilibrium will offer insights into and case studies of cloud architecture, cloud mobility, virtualization, interoperability, and scalability.
And at INVESTING IN THE CLOUD, keynote addresses by Gigi Johnson of Maremel Institute, Mark Theissen of Cirro, Bruce Cleveland of InterWest Partners, Kevin Lynch of Deloitte Consulting, and Scott Ryan of EMC will examine education clouds, big data, business intelligence, VC criteria, and exit strategies.
This will be followed by a mid-morning networking break in the exhibit hall. Then we'll bring all delegates back together for our conference closing plenary session: "The Future of Cloud Computing for Entertainment, Telecom, and Investment."
We look forward to seeing you in Santa Monica. More information is available here; please register to attend here. Share wisely, and take care.
Cloud Computing to Reach 4.3 Zettabytes in 5 Years
Excerpted from RCR Wireless Report by Roberta Prescott
Global data center traffic is forecast to grow fourfold to reach a total of 6.6 zettabytes annually by 2016, while cloud traffic is expected to achieve 4.3 zettabytes by 2016, a 44% combined annual growth rate (CAGR), from 683 exabytes of annual traffic in 2011.
These forecasts were released by Cisco in its second annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (GCI), 2011-2016.
Although in general, fixed networks offer better upload and download speeds, and latencies than mobile networks, Cisco said the performance gap between fixed and mobile networks will begin to close in the near future. This might happen because of the growing global adoption of advanced mobile technologies, such as third- and fourth-generation (3G and 4G), and the worldwide demand for wireless support of next-generation devices.
The study also indicates that business connections tend to have significantly greater capacity than consumer connections (fixed and mobile). From a business cloud services perspective, many networks are currently capable of supporting intermediate business applications, and some are currently capable of supporting advanced business applications (such as high-definition video and audio conferencing).
Highlights from the updated research include the following projections: global data center traffic will grow nearly fourfold from 2011 to 2016; by 2016, global data center traffic will reach 6.6 zettabytes per year; by 2016, two-thirds of all data center traffic will come from the cloud; by 2016, three-out-of-five data center workloads will be processed in the cloud.
According to Cisco's report, the vast majority of the data center traffic is not caused by end-users but by data centers and cloud-computing workloads used in activities that are virtually invisible to individuals.
For example, for the period of 2011-2016, Cisco forecasts that roughly 76% of data center traffic will stay within the data center and will be largely generated by storage, production, and development data. An additional 7% of data center traffic will be generated between data centers, primarily driven by data replication and software/system updates. The remaining 17% of data center traffic will be fueled by end-users accessing clouds for web surfing, e-mailing, and video streaming.
Cisco Global Cloud Index also noted that by 2016, the Asia Pacific region will process the most cloud workloads (40.6 million or 36% of global cloud workloads); followed by North America, which will have 17.4 million or 26% of global cloud workloads in 2016.
Based on the regional, average download and upload speeds, and latencies for business and consumer connections, Cisco said that all regions can support some level of cloud services. However, no region's average network characteristics are currently able to support high-end, advanced cloud applications.
From 2011 to 2016, the Middle East and Africa are expected to have the highest cloud workload growth rate (73% CAGR); followed by Latin America (60% CAGR); and Central and Eastern Europe (50% CAGR).
Cloud, Circa 2017
Excerpted from ZDNet Report by Joe McKendrick
Imagine being at a business tech conference in 2017. Where will we be? What will speakers be saying about the whole cloud phenomenon of 2012?
My colleague Phil Wainewright just posted his predictions for cloud computing, as it will look five years from now, and I couldn't agree more with his predictions, listed below (a couple of my own predictions follow as well):
Cloud is delivered on mobile, includes social: Business will get the cloud even more than the tech folks, and it will endure "not as a technology buzzword but as a layman's term for connected automation," Phil says.
Many businesses will thrive because of cloud: "Cloud, in its widest sense of being connected to a global network of on-demand resources, is transforming entire industries."
Many businesses will falter because of cloud: There's also a dark side, since the disruption cloud creates will put many established companies out of business.
Government will impede the progress of cloud: Am interesting prediction by Phil: "Policy makers want to regulate the cloud — and that's when they see it as a force for good. When they discover the disruptive impact on those established industries that are past masters at political lobbying, it's all too easy to see how governments will be tempted to clip the wings of cloud. Many governments across the globe are already curtailing their citizens' access to cloud resources. As economic pressures intensify, this will get worse, not better."
Cloud is neither public nor private: "The distinction between private and public cloud is illusory," Phil points out.
Cloud is established, so less discussed by name. By 2017, there will be no "cloud." Just computing. As Phil puts it: "As cloud becomes increasingly mainstream, it will be mentioned less and less, simply because it will become the default means of operating IT."
In addition to Phil's predictions, here are a few of my own:
Cloud will facilitate the next startup boom: The economy is lackluster, but the availability of cheap, abundant cloud resources — combined with an underemployed, frustrated professional workforce — will drive countless new start-ups, many so small that they escape government statistics. Cloud is the heart of the "DIY economy," and provides opportunities to launch and fail at business like we've never experienced before.
Technology and non-technology companies will be indistinguishable: Not only will non-tech enterprises (say, car parts manufacturers or business services) be consuming cloud services, but they will be both providing their own services out of their data centers, or brokering someone else's services to their customers. We'll all be tech companies in one form or another.
Big Data will be cloud-borne: There is plenty of nervousness about data in the cloud, but this will subside as enterprises recognize that many providers have more rock-solid security practices than their own IT departments. Managing the flood of Big Data — petabytes of unstructured or semi-structured data such as videos and documents and log data — will increasingly be left to cloud providers with the scale.
Cloud changes IT managers and professionals' jobs: If anything brings IT people close to the business, or into the inner circles of business, it will be cloud. IT people will be less "IT people" and more consultants who identify and contract for the technology resources that get jobs done.
Computing's Low-Cost, Cloud-Centric Future Not Sci-Fi
Excerpted from ZDNet Report by Jason Perlow
In early 2009, I wrote an article called "I've seen the future of computing: It's a screen." It was a an almost sci-fi sort of piece, projecting what I thought the personal computing experience might resemble ten years into the future, in 2019, based on the latest industry trends at the time.
In May of 2011, I wrote another speculative piece about what I thought personal computers would be like in the year 2019. Late last year, I imagined another speculative and futuristic scene, portraying the shift towards e-commerce and the fall of brick and mortar retail shopping.
Futurist thought exercises such as these are always fun, but inevitably, with any sort of long-range predictions of the future, there are things which are very easy to miss and get so wrong that you fall flat on your face. Futurism never gets everything right, but sometimes it can also be dead-on and flat out uncanny in its accuracy.
Excellent examples of these complete miss and "OMG, were they right!" type of predictions can be found in classic sci-fi movies like Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982).
In 2001, Kubrick is way ahead of his time in his depictions of manned and commercial space travel and the colonization of the moon, as well as true artificial intelligence, things which are probably at least several decades away. Still, the technologies to accomplish such feats are definitely within our reach if the world's governments can cooperate and establish clear goals to achieve them.
But in 2001, Kubrick also shows working tablet computers as well as personal video conferencing, technologies which have only recently become more commonplace. In 1968, when the film was first released, the forerunner to the Internet, ARPANET, was still being developed at the US Department of Defense, so the concept of a worldwide connected computer network that was accessible to the average Joe, let alone the military or academia was not yet a part of the common sci-fi vernacular.
Scott's Blade Runner, like Kubrick's 2001, is also very much ahead of its time. Dystopian Futurism is one of the huge themes of the film, depicting flying cars, giant overpopulated and polluted cities with towering 100 story buildings, and genetic engineering gone out of control. 30 years after the film's release, it is still considered to be a sci-fi masterpiece.
We don't have flying cars yet. However, personal computers and mobile devices are everywhere in 2012, something we see a lot of in Blade Runner. And yet, the entire concept of PCs and an entire industry dedicated to them was brand new when the screenplay was in development and being filmed.
And while we don't have the ability to create genetically engineered, custom-made "replicants" of animals and human beings as it is depicted in the movie, life sciences have made tremendous advancements since the film was first released, such as the ability to map the human genome and create genetically modified organisms for commercial use. The cloning of plants and some animals is now common practice in modern agribusiness.
The massive influence of globalization, Japanese culture and its multinational corporations in Blade Runner on American society is a huge part of the film's futurism, and is something that we take very much for granted today.
Little did we know in 1982 when that film was released that not only would Japan surpass the United States as a producer of electronic goods, but in 30 years, it would eventually cede its position as the world's most dominant producer of technology to China, Korea, and other Asian as well as South American countries.
My 2009 "It's a Screen" article describes a future centered around the cloud, server-based computing, virtualization, low-power and low-cost ARM-based devices. The iPhone's App Store at the time was a less than a year old and Android was only beginning to gain market traction with the recent release of the Motorola Droid on Verizon. The iPad was a year away and certainly, there were no Android tablets.
In 2009, the idea of consumer driven cloud-based content consumption and data storage was still very much in its infancy. At the end of 2012, we now have our choice of cloud content and storage providers with Google, Apple, Amazon, and now Microsoft — with the launch of Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Windows RT and the Windows Store.
In 2009, the Chrome browser itself was less than a year old, and the idea of a Chromebook was probably just a twinkle in Google's eye.
This week, Google and Samsung released a new $250 version of the Chromebook. There's not much new or even innovative about this particular device, particularly from a UX standpoint — it's the same Chrome OS we've seen before, except that it now runs on very inexpensive, ARM-based hardware.
So it's understandable that a lot of prominent tech industry bloggers have received this with a yawn, especially since we're now witnessing the introduction of the iPad Mini, as well as Microsoft's Windows 8 OS and Windows RT tablets, not to mention another Google Android event which is rumored to be the launch of several new Nexus-branded Android devices.
Granted, there's a lot more sexy and pure "wow" factor in these devices than the new Chromebook. But that doesn't make the launch of the new Chromebook any less important than a newer, smaller iPad or the next generation of Microsoft's OS.
The significance of this particular product release isn't about UX and Apps. It's about bringing the cost of computing down to affordable, almost disposable levels, and leveraging the cloud to do the heavy lifting which we've otherwise relied upon much more powerful personal computers to do before.
For the past 30 years, the driving force behind personal computing been Moore's law — the quest to double microprocessor density and performance every 12-18 months.
What the Chromebook truly represents is moving away from Moore's Law as the key metric in the development of personal computing.
While the price of personal computers in the last 30 years has gone down substantially, and they have become exponentially more powerful, they are still considered to be expensive and inaccessible to many people, particularly in poor urban and rural population centers in the United States, other parts of the Western world, as well as in developing countries.
They are also prone to quick obsolescence, require regular software maintenance, can be expensive to repair, and require considerable support infrastructure. And with the state of the current world economy, the quality and longevity and reliability of computer components has also declined substantially. To use the old adage, they definitely "don't make them like they used to."
So what the Chromebook truly represents is moving away from Moore's Law as the key metric in the development of personal computing.
Instead of doubling processor speed on a yearly basis as the prime goal of the semiconductor industry, we're going to see processor and component integration increase on a yearly basis, moving away from expensive laptops and desktops with many components requiring complex and expensive manufacturing processes to single-chip systems which are much more power efficient, cheaper to produce, and cost under $300 retail.
That Samsung can produce the new Chromebook, using its own processor foundries, its very own manufactured RAM and flash storage, and its own display technology is a massive vertical integration achievement in and of itself and should not be ignored.
It's something that even Apple, which is a veritable master of supply chain management, still does not have the capability to do.
So what will computing's future really look like in 2019? Who will be the leaders and what will be the predominant platform?
I'm not going to say that it's going to be Apple, Google, Microsoft, or some other player which may emerge. From a platform standpoint, the playing field is still wide open. It would not surprise me at all if every single one of those companies carves out a distinctive niche for their respective ecosystems, acting as feudal lords over their cloud estates.
What I can tell you is that the rules have changed, and the balance of power has shifted — to empower the user, in a far cheaper, much more ubiquitous way than we ever imagined.
As Mobile Grows, So Does Cloud Computing
Excerpted from ComputerWorld Report by Bernard Golden
Analyst firm IHS published an important study last week. It predicts that, for the first time ever, PC shipments would drop year-over-year; for 2012, total shipments will drop 1.2 percent. IDC and Gartner agree, noting that third-quarter PC shipments fell 8 percent. It's the steepest drop since 2001.
While it's clear that use of new form factors such as smart-phones and tablets has been skyrocketing over the past few years, this study is the first that indicates that this growth, far from incremental, is taking share from the previously dominant form factor. Of course, some may not accept the study's findings, feeling that rumors of the death of the PC have been overstated. It may be the case, too, that the total number of PCs sold in 2012 won't really shrink but may instead end-up showing modest growth.
Whether you accept the study's prediction or not, it's clear that the heady growth of PCs is over and this form factor now represents a mature market. Incremental growth in client use will shift to these new form factors.
What's crucial to understand, however, is that these form factors are just moving into their torrid growth phase, and the total client device market is going to explode well beyond common expectations. Put more simply, while PCs recently have been growing on the order of 5 percent or 10 percent per year, these new devices are growing at rates exceeding 100 percent; in a few years their growth will cause the overall client device market to be 500 percent or even 1,000 percent larger.
That growth is going to make the cloud computing phenomenon even bigger.
Why? It's simple. Smart-phones and tablets are application consumption devices. People don't do computing on them, they do computing with them. While the data may emanate from the device (a digital photo taken with an iPhone app, for example), the computing for that app typically resides elsewhere-in the cloud.
I do far more computing with my iPad than I ever imagined, but the computing is of a different form than what I do with my laptop or desktop machine. I consume media (Netflix and Amazon Video), interact with apps (Feedly for RSS feeds, SlideShark to display presentations, and specialized apps to interact with different services like that from my local library system), and perform ongoing business functions such as reading email-but I am not, generally speaking, creating much data or content on the device.
The ultimate destination for my iPad apps is some cloud-based application. That's where the data and functionality reside. Every one of the apps I use drives remote computing in the cloud.
All this doesn't mean PCs are going to disappear. They will still be preeminent data creation devices for people doing traditional applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, and digital image editing. It just means that to forecast the total amount of computing to be done based on an assumed market size and assumed user profiles associated with PCs is to vastly underestimate the total amount of computing that is going to be done in the future.
It also means that forecasts of the total cloud computing market size are wildly undersized. There are three reasons for this:
The most obvious one, which has just been examined, is that these devices encourage additional, incremental computing. Where once one finished "computing" and then watched TV, now one finishes "computing" and watches TV and "computes" by using a tablet to look at IMDB to learn more about one of the actors, to browse through Facebook to see if one's friends are watching the show (or to tell them they should be watching the show), to look through Yelp to see where to order dinner to eat while watching the show, and so on.
Or, instead of watching TV, I do something else, but use a smart-phone or tablet at the same time in an analogous fashion for that activity; for example, I go to a miniature golf course, shoot some video of my family playing and upload it to my Facebook page. These devices extend the timescale and geography of computing and increase the total share of stomach, so to speak, that computing represents.
Second, the "API-ification" of cloud-based applications means it is much easier to access them via smart-phones and tablets, enabling new market niches to be addressed. I use a lot of public transportation when traveling and use a number of applications that consume data streams published by transit agencies. A few years ago I would have been forced to look online at an agency's website to make my plans, which would have been limited to the data in the published schedule.
Now I can use a smart-phone app that mashes up the schedule along with GPS data from individual buses or trains, and I can better calculate my plans-and adjust them in real time. This API-driven app world expands the scope of computing, which will result in an explosion of applications as new market niches get exploited.
Finally, the Internet of Things will transform the nature of computing. Most people are relatively short-sighted in extrapolating the trends in client devices, failing to see that the current trend is just one waystation on the journey of ever-smaller, ever-more powerful, ever-cheaper, ever-expanding number of devices.
We are nowhere near the ultimate endgame of this journey, and the upcoming effect of small, powerful, cheap and numerous devices will serve to expand "computing well beyond how we think of it today. One example is the Nike+ Fuelband, which essentially turns the human body into a LAN, generating data about heart rate and activity level and using it as a motivational goal.
As the number of devices grows- Cisco Systems predicts 1 trillion devices by 2013; their timing may be wrong but their direction is dead-on-and as the amount of data they generate expands, the scale of cloud computing will grow beyond anyone's wildest guess.
While writing this column, I came across an account of a start-up building a robotic weeder that could cut pesticide use in agriculture. As these devices get rolled out into the (literal) field, each one will transmit scads of data regarding number and type of weeds, crop growth and so on. Again, more computing and more data.
I believe the biggest problem the IT industry will face in the relatively near future is not gaining acceptance for cloud computing. That will come-not through "official" acceptance, mind you, but through the steady and accelerating tactical adoption and creation of individual applications that accrete until everyone acknowledges that it is now the quotidian mode.
Instead, I believe the biggest challenge for the IT industry will be growing computing infrastructure fast enough to handle all the computing driven by the factors outlined above. I'm not sure Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, mighty as their technical competence and capital budgets are, will together be able to keep up with the burgeoning demand that all of us will create.
Of course, keeping up with unanticipated demand is a welcome challenge; despite the cries of " Apple didn't get the iPhone 5 launch right," which of us wouldn't love to switch places with them and have to deal with the problem of too many people thrusting money at us? Nevertheless, addressing the volume demands of cloud computing will be the challenge for the industry. Just wait and see.
Gartner: Cloud Computing, Mobile Putting IT on Edge
Excerpted from SearchSOA Report by Jack Vaughn
A variety of mostly consumer-driven forces challenge enterprise IT and application development today. Cloud computing, web information, mobile devices, and social media innovations are converging to dramatically change modern organizations and their central IT shops. Industry analyst group Gartner describes these forces as forming a nexus, a connected group of phenomena, which is highly disruptive.
As in earlier shifts to client-server computing and web-based e-commerce, the mission of IT is likely to come under serious scrutiny. How IT should adjust was a prime topic at this week's Gartner ITxpo conference held in Orlando, FL.
"A number of things are funneling together to cause major disruption to your environment," David Cearley, Vice President and Gartner Fellow, told CIOs and other technology leaders among the more than 10,000 assembled at the Orlando conference.
"Mobile has outweighed impact in terms of disruption. The mobile experience is eclipsing the desktop experience," said Cearley, who cited the large number of mobile device types as a challenge to IT shops that had over the years achieved a level of uniformity via a few browsers and PC types. "You need to prepare for heterogeneity," he told the audience.
Crucially, mobile devices coupled with cloud computing can change that basic architecture of modern corporate computing.
"You need to think about 'cloud-client' architecture, instead of client-server," Cearley said. "The cloud becomes your control point for what lives down in the client. Complex applications won't necessarily work in these mobile settings."
This could mean significant changes in skill sets required for enterprise application development. The cloud-client architecture will call for better design skills for front-end input. Development teams will have to make tradeoffs between use of native mobile device OSes and HTML5 web browser alternatives, according to Cearley. The fact that these devices are brought into the organization by end-users acting as consumers also is a factor.
"The user experience is changing. Users have new expectations," he said. For application architects and developers, he said, there are "new design skills required around how applications communicate and work with each other."
The consequences are complex. For example, software development and testing is increasingly not simply about whether software works or not, according to one person on hand at Gartner ITxpo. "We get great pressures to improve the quality of service we provide. It's not just the software, it's how the customer interacts with the software," said Dave Miller, Vice President of Software Quality Assurance at FedEx Services.
Shifts in software architecture, such as those seen today in cloud and mobile applications, have precedence, said Miko Matsumura, Senior Vice President of Platform Marketing and Developer Relations at Mateo, CA based mobile services firm Kii. In the past, there have been "impedance mismatches," for example, in the match between object software architecture and relational data architecture, he noted.
The effect of mobile development means conventional architecture is evolving. "What happens is you see the breakdown of the programming model," said Matsumura, a longtime SOA thought leader whose firm markets a type of mobile back end as a service offering. "Now we have important new distinctions. A whole class of developers treat mobile from the perspective of cloud."
"Now, if you are a mobile developer, you don't need to think about the cloud differently than you think of your mobile client," he said. With "client cloud," he continued, "it's not a different programming model, programming language, or programming platform." That is a different situation than we find in most development shops today, where Java or .NET teams and JavaScript teams work with different models, languages, and platforms.
The changes in application development and application lifecycles are telling, according to Gartner's Jim Duggan, Vice President for Research. "Mobile devices and cloud — a lot of these things challenge conventional development," he said. He said Gartner estimates that by 2015 mobile applications will outnumber those for static deployment by four to one. This will mean that IT will have to spend more on training of developers, and will likely do more outsourcing as well.
"Deciding which are the skills that you need to have internally is going to change the way your shop evolves," he said.
Underlying the tsunami of disruptive consumerist forces Gartner sees is a wholesale digitization of commerce. At the conference Gartner analysts said such digitization of business segments will lead to a day when every budget becomes an IT budget. Firms will begin to create the role of chief digital officer as part of the business unit leadership, Gartner boldly predicted, estimating 25% of organizations will have chief digital officers in place by 2015.
The chief digital officer title may grow, according to Kii's Matsumura. Often today, marketing departments are controlling the mobile and social media agendas within companies, he said.
"We are seeing a convergence point between the human side of the business — in the form of marketing — and the 'machine-side,' in the form of IT," he said.
Broadcasters' Steady March towards an All-IP Environment
Excerpted from TV Technology Report by James Careless
Video over IP has become the preferred way of shipping broadcast video for economic reasons. It is significantly less expensive to convert and compress video into files capable of being sent over semiprivate or even public Internet channels than it is to send raw uncompressed video over dedicated fiber or satellite channels.
For instance, as a result of moving to video over IP, Showtime is saving "70 percent on bandwidth costs compared to what they paid before," said T-VIPS COO Janne Morstol Chief Operating Officer for T-VIPS, a Norwegian provider of signal processing technology.
Video over IP is also the most effective way for broadcasters to populate the diversity of screens in use today. These include HDTVs, PCs, tablets, and the ever-growing number of smart-phones running on Apple iOS, Android and BlackBerry operating systems.
Granted, video over IP has yet to get a solid footing within the internal production infrastructure of TV stations and networks, but as costs come down, this too is likely to change.
Wes Simpson, President of Telecom Product Consulting in Orange CT and author of "Video Over IP" (Focal Press, 2008), is impressed by the technology's progress in displacing dedicated telephone/ satellite circuits for moving broadcast video. "This trend is underway and fairly well established," he said.
Simpson is equally impressed that streaming media platforms are consolidating on a handful of major platforms such as Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Microsoft's Silverlight, Adobe Flash, and the emerging Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH).
This move towards a few video over IP platforms, and away from a stable of proprietary formats, "is making it much easier to be a video content producer," Simpson said. Such consolidation also makes this role less expensive, because there are fewer kinds of streams that need to be provided.
That's not all. Thanks to enhancements to video compression techniques, broadcasters are delivering better quality pictures via video over IP to multi-platform devices, according to Thomas Lattie, Vice President of Product Development for Harmonic. While improving quality, the bitrate reductions associated with these enhancements "are reducing transport and data costs." On a per-viewer basis, this cuts the price for reaching eyeballs.
Looking ahead, the transport advantages offered by video over IP could provide broadcasters with some viewer-grabbing options. For instance, a broadcaster could take every single camera angle of a goal during a sports game, and offer them to viewers online in real time.
The viewer could then select whichever camera angle suits them best, or go from one view to another as it suits them. This unprecedented level of choice is what's possible when "video over IP transport takes away limits," said Petter Ole Jakobsen, CTO of Vizrt.
Add the ability of video over IP to fit seamlessly into a broadcaster's overall IP-based infrastructure — and to interact easily with the outside world — and one can see why it could make sense for a TV station/network to move to an all-IP workflow. Such an approach would give a broadcaster both "scalability and cost effectiveness," said Gal Garnier Vice President of Compression and Distribution Systems for Evertz. An all-IP plant would allow everything to work in this universe, starting at the camera and moving into production, editing, storage and multi-platform distribution.
Clearly, there is a lot to be said for video over IP's myriad possibilities. So what is holding this revolution back?
The main factor is cost. "When you look at the price of a broadcast baseband router and compare it to a Cisco IP router, the broadcast router is pretty compelling from a price standpoint," said Simpson. Historically, price has always mattered to broadcasters, but now it matters more than ever due to the recession's impact on ad revenues; competition from non-broadcast platforms for viewers, and the relentless growth of viewing options.
The second obstacle is legacy infrastructure. Broadcasters don't want to tear out a broadcast-specific plant that still works. And when it is time to buy a new video router, broadcasters may be more comfortable with buying a new version of what they have now, rather than taking "the leap to an IP-based infrastructure," said Eugene Keane CTO of Norwegian-based Nevion, which announced a recent merger with T-VIPS, in part to take advantage of the industry's move to video over IP.
Do these obstacles mean that video over IP ascendancy may not be a sure thing? Not at all. It's just something that will take time to occur. After all, the broadcast industry's move to a file-based video workflow "took 15 years," said Eric DuFosse, Vice President of Marketing for Grass Valley. "Moving forward, we can see baseband video going IP," he noted, even if the process takes many years to come to pass.
Coming Events of Interest
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 - November 8th-9th in Santa Monica. CA. CCW:2012 will zero in on the latest advances in applying cloud-based solutions to all aspects of high-value entertainment content production, storage, and delivery; the impact of cloud services on broadband network management and economics; and evaluating and investing in cloud computing services providers.
INTELLIGENCE IN THE CLOUD - December 4th in Washington, DC. This workshop continues the NAB's series of programs developed for military and government professionals to demonstrate how advances in the commercial industries can benefit the military and government sectors. The atmosphere for the workshop is interactive with attendee participation welcome.
Third International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery Using Cloud and Distributed Computing Platforms - December 10th in Brussels, Belgium. Researchers, developers, and practitioners from academia, government, and industry will discuss emerging trends in cloud computing technologies, programming models, data mining, knowledge discovery, and software services.
2013 International CES - January 8th-11th in Las Vegas, NV. With more than four decades of success, the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) reaches across global markets, connects the industry and enables CE innovations to grow and thrive. The International CES is owned and produced by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the preeminent trade association promoting growth in the $195 billion US consumer electronics industry.
CONTENT IN THE CLOUD at CES - January 9th in Las Vegas, NV. Gain a deeper understanding of the impact of cloud-delivered content on specific segments and industries, including consumers, telecom, media, and CE manufacturers.
NAB Show 2013 - April 4th-11th in Las Vegas, NV. Every industry employs audio and video to communicate, educate and entertain. They all come together at NAB Show for creative inspiration and next-generation technologies to help breathe new life into their content. NAB Show is a must-attend event if you want to future-proof your career and your business.
CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE at NAB - April 8th-9th in Las Vegas, NV.The New ways cloud-based solutions have accomplished better reliability and security for content distribution. From collaboration and post-production to storage, delivery, and analytics, decision makers responsible for accomplishing their content-related missions will find this a must-attend event.
CLOUD COMPUTING EAST 2013 - May 20th-21st in Boston, MA. CCE:2013 will focus on three major sectors, GOVERNMENT, HEALTHCARE, and FINANCIAL SERVICES, whose use of cloud-based technologies is revolutionizing business processes, increasing efficiency and streamlining costs.
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