Venyu Blog

When I’m not writing this blog I spend a lot of time listening to talk radio. That includes sports radio programming. One of the more popular sports radio stations here in metro Boston — WEEI — features a homebrew called “The Big Show,” hosted by Glenn Ordway and, until only recently, included a running assortment of co-hosts, from Boston area ex-football and basketball stars to local sports columnists, professional coaches and other sports-minded “gadflys.”  While these folks often (and willingly) served themselves up as Glenn’s “foils,” their informed opinions easily and (mostly) enjoyably filled up the show’s four hour running time.

Every show ends with “The Whiner Line” where sports fans call in on a pre-recorded line and “whine” about this or that, including the fortunes (or foibles) of the local teams. Some of these callers target Glenn’s notoriety for flip-flopping on subjects, including a Glenn Ordway impersonator who almost always ends his whine with the line ”You’re making my point.”

That line really came home for me recently when I came across this article from an online publication called Smart Business that included an interview with Mark Swanson, the CEO of a Tampa, Florida based cloud communications consultancy that was served up the following premise by the reporter: “At one of the Information Technology trade shows, one of the industry’s pundits made a startling prediction — that the shift to the cloud computing platform will be bigger than the shift to the Internet or the shift from the mainframe to the PC. “

Presented with that opinion Swanson found the claim to be “pretty outlandish.”  Swanson instead suggests that the keystone to transitioning from the mainframe to the PC was more about a prior vision of computing as a utility, whereas the transition today to the cloud is all about bandwidth, stating “We now have enough fast bandwidth to deliver the same kind of experience that we have on desktop computers so we are starting to use devices to access the platform rather than use the device itself…It is affecting everything — hardware, software, the way we use computing and even the way we view computing. If you look at it this way, I think that it is at least as big as the shift to PCs or the Internet.”

According to Swanson the reasons for this shift are clear and compelling:

• You can use the cloud from any device. iPhone, Android, iPad, notebook, netbook, it does not matter. Regardless of the way you hook up using cloud apps, you can complete your work as long as your Internet service is reliable.
• You can use the cloud independent of location. Remember the days of running around trying to find a phone data port to dial up the Internet? We can now browse from our car, the train or the park; get our e-mail; complete our part on a project plan; or help a buddy half way around the world to finish her research paper. We send our e-mails while we are stuck in traffic — on the median, of course! It really has become an anywhere utility.
• You can use the cloud to pool resources. Certainly there’s the ability to harness processing power of remote computers to do things faster, but it is not just that. You can also pull together knowledge resources, human resources, process resources, etc. Want to put together a team of great accountants? Geography is no longer a factor, as you can find talent on LinkedIn. In an argument about a fact with a co-worker? ‘Google it’ and leverage some expert who might be half way across the world. In the pursuit of leveraging the world’s resources, cloud computing is revolutionary.

These are aided and abetted, argues Swanson, by what clouds can offer vendors, and in turn, to their customers and their internal users:

• Revenue smoothing. Software sales  — and in particular enterprise sales — are very lumpy. It is feast or famine. What vendors like is there’s a nice predictable revenue stream.
• Piracy prevention. Prior to delivering software in the cloud, hackers were always trying to break into software and license keys were always floating around in some digital form. Delivering via the cloud stops piracy as it is very easy to check credentials each time users log in on the Web.
• Support costs. Supporting multiple versions of software that is deployed on different forms of media can be costly. Version control management was often a multi-staffed function, keeping up with the various versions deployed.

Cumulatively, these bullet points say it all. In other words Mark, “You’re making my point.”