Cloudy week

I felt like in clouds this week. I joined three presentations and all of them were about cloud computing. All three were indicating and predicting the new cloud-computing trend, the advantage of the economy of scale. Large number of computers managed by relatively small staff, the elasticity, the capability to scale on demand. Great applications shared by many small companies and charged per use, no upfront payment, with fast and for the user invisible improvements. Gartner, other analysts and technologists predictions are clear: move to cloud or perish.

It started on Monday morning with Gartner and EMC joined presentation. In the Gartner presentation Jana Ridziova has pointed out the trends and risks of cloud computing. She also gave some interesting numbers. The main message: IT technology is becoming massively scalable, standardized and offered as a service. Many companies will get rid of their IT infrastructure and will use the SaaS.

The next presentation by Sanjay Mirchandani a CIO of EMS can be easily characterized: virtualize, virtualize, virtualize. No wonder EMC owns 80% of the X86 virtualization leader VMware. But frankly, the most important point was the savings EMC achieved by virtualizing 70% of the company. The realized benefits are $12M in power and space, $74M in the data center equipment, 170% in data storage and admin productivity, and 34% increase in power efficiency. These are great numbers and we have to learn out of them.

Steven Willmott, the CEO of 3scale networks has visited the CTU on Wednesday. His presentation has been inspired by the Wired article “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet”. He has been arguing that the web has changed from the static HTML pages to a set of API supporting wide range of functionality for different devices. He has been showing some of the cloud technologies used in his company. His talks were presented to students and overall they received comprehensive breakdown of the new wave of Internet technologies.