By Dick Weisinger, on January 27th, 2012
In the US, the Obama administration over the last year has been pushing cloud computing hard across federal agencies. Now in the EU, a similar call is being made for European governments to adopt cloud computing.
Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the Digital Agenda for the European Commission, said that “We need to act to support speedy uptake of cloud computing in Europe. The cloud market will grow, bringing opportunities for existing suppliers and new entrants. And cloud buyers, including the public sector, will buy more with less and become more efficient.”
Kroes proposed at the World Economic Forum conference held this week in Davos the creation of a European Cloud Partnership which would bring together public authorities and industry to create a common policy for how cloud procurement would be handled by EU government bodies. Challenges in being able to create a policy that all can agree to include a lack of cloud standards, security issues, interoperability, lock-in and existing laws. The partnership is to be funded initially with 10 million euros, or about $13 million.
Given the current economic climate in Europe, one of the goals of the cloud partnership is to be able to make available computing capability to public and private sector bodies at a lower cost than currently available.
Kroes emphasized in her address that the plan is not to try to create an independent European-based super-cloud, but instead the goal is to ensure that European governments can create cloud-friendly policies which will enable them to be cloud-active. The initial charter for the partnership is to take a three phase approach, and it is expected that work on the three phases will continue over the next two years.
The first phase is to develop a set of common requirements for cloud procurement.
The second phase is to create a proof-of-concept solution that meets all common requirements.
The third phase to create a reference implementation based on the proposed solution.
By Dick Weisinger, on January 26th, 2012
Cloud computing and Social Computing technologies are beginning to have an effect on the areas of Engineering and Manufacturing.
Just one example of this trend is the announcement by AutoDesk in December that they are entering the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) space, and they are leap-frogging their competition by doing it by introducing an offering designed from the ground up explicitly for the cloud. Another example is Fujitsu’s “Engineering Cloud” launched last summer which targets the management of computer-aided design (CAD), analytics, and engineering process and planning in the cloud.
Fear of the possible loss of intellectual property has kept cloud adoption rates by engineering and manufacturing organizations low, but that’s changing. Organizations are being lured by the competitive advantages which the cloud can provide, which include reducing costs, improving collaboration, and speeding processes.
A survey of automotive, electronics and industrial machinery manufacturers in the US and Europe by Microsoft in early 2011 found that these companies thought that the following functional areas of their organizations would most benefit from the use of Cloud and Social Computing:
- 68.5% - Sales and Marketing
- 52.3% – Product Design and Engineering
- 51.0% – Logistics and Transportation
- 47.0% – Manufacturing Operations and Processes
- 43.6% – Supply Chain and Distribution Networks
Sanjay Ravi, Managing Director of Worldwide Discrete Manufacturing Industry at Microsoft, said that “Manufacturers are exploring ways to improve product design with social product development, enhance visibility across multiple tiers in the value chain, and create new business models and customer experiences based on smart devices connecting to the cloud.”
By Dick Weisinger, on January 25th, 2012
For the cloud, “the easy stuff is done,” declared Art Wittman in an InformationWeek wrap-up article re-capping the technology highlights for 2012. Challenges in the areas of integration and security lie ahead for the cloud. And those challenges are beginning to slow the rate of acceptance for the technology. While there is no doubt that cloud computing is radically changing the world of IT, InformationWeek measured the uptick in new-adopter companies for 2011 to be a modest 2 percent. In 2009, 18 percent of companies were using cloud services. That number jumped dramatically in 2010 to 31 percent, but this past year it has stayed fairly constant, finishing out the year at 33 percent.
The breakdown for exactly how organizations use the cloud is as follows:
- 57 percent use SaaS
- 56 percent use it to enable virtualization
- 42 percent use the cloud as a platform
- 27 percent use the cloud for their IT infrastructure
One segment of the cloud that did see significant growth in 2011 was Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR). The goal of BC/DR is to be able to safely store in a location remote to an organization’s central operations important business data that can quickly be brought on-line should a disaster strike the main organization’s central data infrastructure. Many organizations are recognizing that the nature of the cloud makes it an ideal fit for BC/DR solutions. In 2010, 34 percent of organizations were using the cloud for BC/DR. In 2010, that number jumped to 43 percent. The main barrier to adoption are concerns with security, and the InformationWeek report found that concern over cloud security is actually rising rather than dropping. Of those organizations not using the cloud for BC/DR, slightly more than half say that their concern is with security.
The InformationWeek report also found that companies are increasingly using virtualization. A quarter of organizations are planning to virtualize as many as 75 to 90 percent of all of their servers. Virtualization is increasingly popular because of the benefits that it brings like higher availability and better flexibility and agility.
