IBM Innovation Portal

“We get to keep virtually all of that money”

Don't know if you follow Ben Worthen's usually insightful blog on WSJ.com...as you might expect from following this blog, I don't agree with him or the mostly evolutionarily-challenged posters that inexplicably agree with his premise that Cloud is just a lot of fog. If you want a dose of classic FUD (fear uncertaintly and doubt) re where software is headed, check this out

And for a good view of why Larry feels this way, all you have to do is add up all of those zeros behind the 20%+ yearly maintenance fees that continue to prop-up software and application companies. Here is Larry's own Co-President: “We get to keep virtually all of that money,” said Oracle Co-President Safra Catz. Sure, some of that goes to customer service, but Catz said that mostly customers are paying for access to the new software – and Oracle is going to develop that new software regardless of whether customers pay them maintenance fees. For Oracle, maintenance is pretty much free money, about $10.5 billion worth in its 2008 fiscal and about $1.5 billion more than that this year. “When many customers just send you money for something you’re doing anyway, you literally can’t help [but increase profits],” said Catz.

You can't make this stuff up... if there was any doubt about what these companies are poo-pooing Cloud it is for this reason.

Wavvy Clouds

We have word that the U. S. Patent and Trade Office has approved a application by Google that outlines a scheme to build a giant floating data center powered by ocean energy in the form of waves, tides and currents.

The article by our friends at  greentechmedia  specifically talks about their using Pelamis machines, developed by Scottish firm, Pelamis Wave Power, as a way to build the power systems.

"Pelamis machines are giant, linked semi-submerged cylindrical parts that produce electricity when wave motions drive a hydraulic system that includes electrical generators. Pelamis has built a 2.25-megawatt wave energy farm off the coast of Portugal."

It makes a huge amount of sense to co-locate  datacenters and alternative power sources, as it's typically far cheaper to move electrons than atoms. This idea can be extended to others forms of alternative power, for example wind and solar. The trick with these, it would seem will be how to dispatch the workloads in the datacenter to "sync" these loads with the availability of power from these intermittent  sources. Hmmm...I smell another patent....or better, startup!

Collision in the Cloud?

Early indications are that starting up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) didn't actually end all life as we know it...at least not in the 4 dimensions I am familiar with (see String Theory Simplified )

But my new bud Kirill Sheynkman, head of Cloud start-up Elastra, said (via itWorldCanada) that this sounds a lot like the early adopters of grid computing , the Web. 2.0 start-ups who want to get up and running quickly and without a lot of capital expense, independent software vendors that want to offer their applications in a software-as-a-service model, and enterprises who have selected specific applications for the cloud, such as salesforce automation or human resources.

Kirill goes on to say that “Equipment inside the corporate data centre isn't going away anytime soon,” added Sheynkman. Companies remain reluctant, for a variety of reasons, to trust the cloud for their mission-critical applications. This includes issues around licencing, compliance, interoperability, data privacy and security.

Will Cloud computing draw the rath of government?

Now this is scary...a recent post in InfoWorld "Cloud computing may draw government action" explains that as cloud computing becomes increasingly popular, policy makers will debate issues such as the privacy and security of data in the cloud...what do you think?

What is Cloud Anyway?

Irving Wladasky-Berger, chairman emeritus of IBM's Academy of Technology, recently posted a comprehensive overview on Cloud Computing titled "What is Cloud Computing, Anyway?" on his blog.  Irving also wrote about this subject in an earlier post, "The Promise and Reality of Cloud Computing." 

http://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2008/07/what-is-cloud-c.html