Q2 - Industry (CA Technologies)

In my opinion, the technology that supports cloud computing (ex. virtualization, multi-tenant, and disaster recovery) isn’t revolutionary, instead, it’s just natural advancement in pursuing ever-efficient computing. However, after incorporating those advanced technology to achieve the scale of economic that has shown by some IT vendors/providers(ex. Amazon, Salesforce.com…), the impact is then revolutionary. I’ve read someone calling it the “democratization of IT” and I feel it’s quite appropriate.

<Benefits for the business and IT consumer>
For example, business like Dropbox is unlikely to be initiated by a college graduate before cloud computing because he won’t be able to “test” his idea without a big hardware investment first. Furthermore, without public cloud computing, Dropbox will struggle to keep its resources as demand grows. Those unmet need will damage the business growth and reputation.

Also, small business firms who wouldn’t consider buying on-premise CRM software to manage its business now has an option to subscribe Salesforce.com. They can treat this IT expenditure simply as monthly expense, instead of capital expenditure that makes his financial statement look bad and hard to justify.

<Impact on the IT industry>
As for the impact on IT industry, I believe the cloud computing paradigm will increase the competitiveness of the industry. Private cloud providers like CA now has to think hard about how they can justify their expensive on-premise service while customers can look for more cost-efficient public cloud solution. Public cloud providers face customers who can switch service with no sunk costs incur.(Unlike the on-premise lock-in effect)

However, because the cost structure underlying cloud computing desperately needs scale of economics, I’m also wondering if it will only create high concentration of market instead of a competitive IT industry (e.g. big players has all, newcomers has high entrance barrier) It’s gonna be an interesting trend to watch.

I like the idea of Skype from Mathilde and the idea of sharing photos from Josephine. It will really help a lot in my daily life.

I also think Dropbox could establish relationships with other online services. For example, KKBOX - a music software in Taiwan to provide legal music to its users with monthly subscription fee (about NT$150). I have used KKBOX for 5-6 years. And sometimes it's a little inconvenient when I use another computer. Because when using different computer, users always establish new music list even though they log in by the same account. Although KKBOX allow user to upload their music list by hand, but it is still a little inconvenient. Because you won't remember to upload your list every-time you log out and download you list every-time you log in by hand. So I really hope Dropbox could establish relationship with KKBOX. Then whenever I make some change to my music list, Dropbox always update my list automatically! Furthermore, KKBOX is a paying software, I think it would be helful to increase the revenue of Dropbox:)

The IT techniques "Grid Computing" and "Distributed computing" which had been appeared for about ten years.
When you find these terms in Wiki , you could see only little difference in IT techniques between these terms and "Cloud Computing".
In my opinion, the term "Cloud computing" is not really a technical term , but much like a business term
which tells every consumers that now IT infrastructure is good enough and the speed of Internet is fast enough,
so now our companies have many new Internet services to provide.

Like Dropbox, some people think it's a revolution "Cloud computing" service, but when we ask what's the revolution IT techniques in Dropbox? It's difficult to tell!
The pros of Dropbox is that "easy to use" , "user friendly".
I agree it's really a revolution in User Experience and maybe marketing, but not IT techniques because free internet disk space had appeared for many years.
With this kind of "Cloud Computing", it's still servers and clients at there. The only difference is that now we have high-speed Internet and much more servers everywhere.
As you can see , every company has their own cloud computing definitions depend on their business.
Therefore, I will rather take "Cloud Computing" as a business term which helps the company to market their business.

I cannot comment on how companies restructure their IT department when moving into the cloud. For big companies it is a huge step and a far reaching decision, which also costs jobs, and has to pass many gate keepers and decision takers.

But a new possibility of structuring companies, specifically IT start-ups got quite obvious. Although I don't have a statistics at hand right now, I would say, cloud technology allows for more and easier founding of start-ups. Just like for dropbox, cloud storage renders extremely high investment costs for in-house data management obsolete and serves perfect conditions and possibilities to outsource your infrastructure with a high degree of scalability for rapid growth.

Literally anyone can now start a company with an extremely performant data network with very low investment costs.

Ming-Hui Huang wrote:A disucssion on "Was the cloud disruptive or evolutionary to CA Technologies?" would be more relevant to this case. This reading provides a very good summary about the advance of IT. What I would like you to learn from it is how CA Technologies can reap the benefits of cloud commerce. Whether cloud is disrputive or evolutionary to CA has significant implications to its strategic move, because it is a well-established big company.

Thank you so much for the feedback.

I would say that the cloud is an evolutionary one to CA Technologies rather than a disruptive one. It provides them with many benefits such as economies of scale. The cloud could be disruptive to CA Technologies at first, however with the acquistions they have and the knowledge and experience, the cloud is still quite young and has many space for innovation. With this said, it could be evolutionary to CA.
It might not be an easy transformation, but it is definitely a useful one, because if they would stay where they are they would be lacking behind. So they need to react in order to keep up with the competitors and stay in the game.

Hello Xiaowei, I really love the point you have come out.
Some of my colleagues were investing on Linq to HPC (it’s a solution that Microsoft provides to deal with big data), we have observed that it costs a large amount of time scatter data compare to compute time. And we just got the message that “LINQ to HPC is not plan to move forward with a production release.” Surprisingly, I started to consider that whether cloud computing really work.

For the storage and file sharing, regardless of the security issue, it really innovates our life and brings us, as a user, a whole new experience. But for the real computing part, which is evoluted from grid computing, still have a long way to go!

A disucssion on "Was the cloud disruptive or evolutionary to CA Technologies?" would be more relevant to this case. This reading provides a very good summary about the advance of IT. What I would like you to learn from it is how CA Technologies can reap the benefits of cloud commerce. Whether cloud is disrputive or evolutionary to CA has significant implications to its strategic move, because it is a well-established big company.

Controversy on cloud computing’s role never stop over past few years. In my opinion, it’s just one of many innovations, which evolves from grid computing and other related Internet technologies. In the lab of my home university, a team has been making research with IBM on cloud computing for a long time, and thus makes the conclusion that the most important concern about the Cloud maybe the safety issue. Meanwhile some argue that the safety issue can never be solved thoroughly since the Cloud itself has some “unsafe” features, like sharing, renting... SMB may think it useful, but that only works when no private info is divulged. Even if this problem is being improved step by step, and many people are enjoying its services, it will never be worthy of the name of "revolution" like PC and Internet, which changed the world.

To answer Charles' first question, this infographic and these give some of the benefits from the cloud computing (as perceived by their users): hardware savings, faster development of infrastructure, or the fact that you can pay for what you use are the main advantages of the cloud, among others (automation capabilities, monthly payment plans, "flexibility", requiring less staff, etc.). Even though not directly related to the question, the infographic also give interesting insight on the evolution of the cloud computing (e.g. boom on worldwide spending on cloud computing, from $68 billion in 2009 to $148 billion in 2014) and its market in general (additional information can also be found in Gartner's press release).
I personally don't really have any answer to the second question, but I suppose the "degree of restructuring" of the IT department might precisely depend what the company wants to use: virtual servers running in their own data centers, virtual servers running in a hosted data center, physical server running on dedicated hardware in company's own data center, etc.

charles.gras wrote:
You are laying the emphasis on the innovation of cloud computing for Businesses: Faster data transmission, access from a lot of terminals, less IT resources in-house(or redistribution of IT resources?).
1/ Can you guys think of other advantages for a Business to rely on cloud computing?
2/ Do you have any idea on how IT department are restructured to adapt to the trend?

I think the main idea about using cloud computing for a business is the virtualization of resource, which means, as you said, redistribute the calculating resources and achieve the most efficient use of them, the VPS(virtual private server) can make the resource, CPU, RAM..precisely quantified. Therefore I think IT department should first analyse how many resources they need to use, or how many inefficient resources they are using, and figure out is it really necessary for them to embrace cloud, or it just cost them more after using cloud service.

I also saw an article that said the business should think about the 5W2H while applying cloud service, which are
Why – why use it?
Who – who need to use it?
Where – where shoud I apply it?
What – in what condition to use it?
When – when to start to use it?
How – how to use it?
How much(Cost) – the cost of "Cloud"?

I think the manager should consider these questions carefully rather than follow the trend blindly.

Thanks a lot for your contributions on this one. According to your posts, the cloud trend relies on all the past IT developments and as a result can been seen as an incremental innovation. At the same time the benefits for SMBs is such that it is tempting to consider it as a revolution. Let's try to elaborate a little more on the real advantages Cloud computing brings in the way Businesses work and are shaped.

You are laying the emphasis on the innovation of cloud computing for Businesses: Faster data transmission, access from a lot of terminals, less IT resources in-house(or redistribution of IT resources?).
1/ Can you guys think of other advantages for a Business to rely on cloud computing?

2/ Do you have any idea on how IT department are restructured to adapt to the trend?

Charles

Well, maybe it is clearer than it seems:

What matters to the firms opting for the cloud is the availability of the information and quality of service (24/7, and reactivity if bugs come up). These elements are quite similar to what is being asked to the providers today.

Therefore the Cloud, in my opinion, is closer to an evolution in the way of consuming IT resources than to a real revolution in technology.

I agree with Leo, cloud computing is difficult to outline in a few sentences. It is both revolutionary and evolutionary. "Cloud Computing" has grown to a very broad catch phrase and trend word for people and companies to somehow signify "modernity" or "cutting edge technologies" without fathoming the whole meaning.

Cloud Computing is a technology that improves the way we do things, transmitting data faster and making it more accessible. In that term it is evolutionary as there is only an incremental improvement of what we have today. But at the same time, this new technology allows for so many more new and possibly revolutionary applications, which were not feasible with the old tools.

Google has a revolutionary vision of storing and calculating everything in the cloud, Chrome OS for example, where you only need a web browser and access applications through it. An even further vision would be to take the computer components such as CPU into the cloud as well, and you only send processing requests to the cloud and receive your results. An example is the cloud gaming platform OnLive, which only delivers you a very cheap set-top box, which connects to their servers and streams the video, sound, etc of a game to your TV and streams back your controler input. You can play the latest games with high-end graphics with it, with the necessary bandwidth of course.

This, for instance, allows for very cheap "terminals" and accespoints, making them incredibly cheap to produce and to implement everywhere, moving the vision of ubiquitous computing in our daily life even nearer. That is, of course, just one possible future.

According to me, cloud computing can be considered as both a simple evolution and a revolutionary innovation.
- an evolution: cloud computing might nowadays looks like the last groundbreaking innovation in the domain of IT, but it is only the latest stage we currently know in this area. In 30 years or so we managed to move from mainframe computing, to client server computing, grid computing and now "collaborative" computing. Cloud computing will be only one stage in the evolution of IT and won't remain the most innovative one for a long time.
- a revolutionary innovation: cloud computing is a breakthrough revolution for many organization (especially the small to medium sized businesses) which can access to all of their information everywhere (reducing information access costs), improving work efficiency etc.
In the end, I would say, that cloud computing is a revolution for organizations (if they manage to make the best of it) but only a stage in the IT evolution.

Question #2 concerning CA Technologies: Bringing the Cloud to Earth

In the history of Information Technology (IT) there were some groundbreaking innovations like the Personal Computer and the World Wide Web.
So our question to you is: Do you believe that Cloud Computing is a revolutionary innovation in this industry or do you believe it is just one of many innovations and in a few years there will be an even better way to share resources, software and information? And also please explain why you think so.

Thanks for your participation!