HOT TOPICS

Cloud Computing Trends And Opportunities

Posted on Tuesday, Aug 24th 2010

Cloud Computing and Its Origins

In 1966, Douglas Parkhill talked about utility computing in his book The Challenge of the Computer Utility. He described a future where many computing activities would be provided through computer utilities, analogous to the electricity industry. This future of utility computing has arrived in the form of cloud computing. The term was made popular by Nicholas Carr’s book Big Switch in 2008 and became a reality thanks to the likes of Amazon, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and many other innovative startups. There seems to be opportunity galore for entrepreneurs in the cloud computing market, which is projected to grow beyond $100 billion in the next five years.

Even as I write this, cloud computing has begun its slide down Gartner’s peak of inflated expectations on the slope of enlightenment and is ready to explode. Organizations and industries worldwide have jumped onto the cloud bandwagon. Some are doing pilots; others have gone beyond PoCs and started to deploy cloud-based offerings to beat the competition and reap the benefits of economies of scale, agility, elasticity, and having an infinite supply of computing and application resources available and within reach. The cloud-based SaaS model has mesmerized the new business player market as the metamorphosis of newer companies’ erstwhile capital expenses into pay-per-use operational expenses levels the playing field with established players.

Even established businesses with their in-house IT infrastructure are increasingly looking to harness the benefits of “cloud-bursting” or newer options such as “private clouds” that are viewed as a way to bridge the gap between the cloud and traditional models of data centers.

Today, actual spending on cloud computing may be under 5% of total IT spending, but the momentum and activity in this space are significant. What are some of the challenges that early adopters in the burgeoning community of venture funds, startups, and entrepreneurs aiming for the clouds face? Are there any insightful thought leaders who can guide entrepreneurs in their quest for the holy grail of cloud computing?

Welcome to the Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing (TLCC) series. In this series, we talk with CIOs across industry verticals who have taken a lead in deploying cloud-based offerings within their organizations. Our focus is to dig in and figure out their experiences with cloud computing; find the missing pieces to large-scale adoption and the maturity of cloud computing in terms of business models and pricing; examine the changing role of IT within an organization; and explore standards, integration with on-premise applications, changes in vendor interactions, and much more.

As we peer through the clouds to learn about cloud computing adoption from these CIOs, as part of the 1 Million by 1 Million initiative, we are uncovering some of the blue skies and open opportunities for entrepreneurs who are eager to fill in the gaps and address customer cloud-related pain points with just the right solutions.

We will publish these discussions and interviews here along with guest columns and synopses of key points. We look forward to your valuable comments.

Technology
Pat Toole, CIO of IBM
Ric Telford, Vice President Of Cloud Services, IBM
Fred van den Bosch, CEO of Librato
Mark Settle, CIO of BMC
José Almandoz, CIO of Novell
Nati Shalom, CTO of GigaSpaces
Dennis Hodges CIO Of Inteva
Donald Ferguson, CTO of CA Technologies
Rajan Nagarajan, CIO, Mahindra Satyam
Sanjay Mirchandani, CIO of EMC
Dave Hart, CTO and EVP, Presidio
Carol Kline, CIO Of TeleTech
Laef Olson, CIO Of RightNow
Ken Stephens, Senior VP of Cloud Services of Xerox
Ari Zilka, CTO of Terracotta
Chris Lauwers, CTO of Avistar
Joe Grave, CIO of Stratus
Jared Wray, CTO of Tier 3
Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat
Jon Freeman, CIO of MyCroft, Inc.
Indu Kodukula, CTO of SunGard Availability Services
Jim Stikeleather, CIO of Dell
Willie Tejada, Senior VP and GM of the Enterprise Cloud Division of Akamai
Steven John, CIO of Workday
Marc Ferrentino, CTA of Salesforce
Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture