Venyu Blog

It’s found in the ground-breaking work Future Shock by Alvin Toffler who proposed that human beings’ capacity to adapt to change is finite and our lack of capacity to adapt rapidly to it often results in symptoms and maladies ranging from depression to increased susceptibility to disease. It’s also found in the Ray Kurzweil tome, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever where he suggests that our aspirations of immortality can be realized if we can only get to 120 years of age. There are other examples but the bottom line is that I have always had a keen fascination with authors whom the mainstream media has dubbed “futurists.” At various intervals these prognosticators’ theorems are either embraced by the media or dismissed as so much bunk and hokum tottering ever so circumspectly on the edge of madness. Still, I can’t help but take an interest in hearing these futurists out. That is, of course, just in case they may know something I don’t.

So it was with more than a passing interest I found the writings of a modern IT “futurist” who contends that within the next decade many corporations will—as a result of adopting cloud computing for all of its infrastructure needs —will simply disappear in a bricks-and-mortar kind of way. Effectively, a virtual corporation, an invisible infrastructure. Not surprisingly applying that same logic this futurist also contends that businesses failing to embrace cloud computing as part of a new way of working will likely struggle to survive beyond 2020.

In this article found in the UK Sunday Telegraph, futurologist Dr James Bellini, speaking at the recent cloud computing conference, hosted by The Telegraph and Microsoft, boldly predicted, “If you go forward to the 2020s a successful enterprise will probably have no chief executive, no headquarters and no IT infrastructure,” Dr Bellini said.

As the article unspools Dr. Bellini and Alan Lee-Bourke, chief information officer for a Glasgow not-for-profit organization suggest that all of the pieces required to exist as a virtual business are already in place with cloud computing the platform that puts all of them in the same place and at the same time. This includes:

The acceleration and availability of a virtualized workforce.  According to Bellini, globally 80 percent of employees are already based outside of an organization. In the UK this accounts for more than four million free agent workers. “Businesses that don’t change their model and move to this ecosystem approach simply won’t survive.”

The Internet as a tool for business, not just consumers. The capability of network providers to offer high-speed internet access to anyone, virtually anywhere, makes it a viable proposition for business use and enterprise adoption.

The business migration to the cloud. Globally speaking businesses have already made the move over to the cloud, at least for some business functions. At this conference, for example, approximately half of the delegates in attendance use cloud computing in one form or another at their organization with at least a couple of these enterprises well on their way to eliminating an in-house IT infrastructure altogether.

Not surprisingly (and of course, self-serving like), John Jester, general manager for a Microsoft group based in the UK made the point that cloud computing actually facilitates collaboration.

“When the cloud first came to market a couple of years ago the first thing that came to mind was cost and efficiencies but now the priority is that it offers new capabilities,” he said. “Around 70-80pc of overall IT spend goes on running the IT infrastructure,” he added. “The cloud offers an opportunity to bring that down. That’s where it gets to be really exciting; new ways to drive collaboration internally.”

Dr Bellini drew a parallel with the development of a national grid as a means of distributing electricity. “In the American census of 1900 they had over 50,000 electricity generating plants because businesses had their own electricity generators. It was only when someone suggested having a few very big generators and something called the grid that they had the big switch.”

He added, “I’m a historian of the future so I like to put things in context, and for me, with computing we’re at the beginning of that big switch from having all this expensive equipment in offices and on the desktop. One day the cloud will help us to get rid of the office; those great work prisons of the 20th century.”

Now I’m no futurist — not even an aspiring apprentice — but Dr. Bellini’s hypothesis that the equivalent of a business embracing cloud computing enables its long-term survival — presents a provocative forecast for those already hip-deep in seeding their success in the cloud and dark skies ahead for those who cannot, do not and will not.