Multinationals out themselves as big Aaas fans

Comment The Artificial Intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil believes that innovation, accelerating exponentially, is converging on a point some 20 years ahead when in a flash of universal illumination he calls "The Singularity". It will solve all the problems of mankind.

The accelerating rate of technological development

There's no doubt about the accelerating rate of technological development. Our ability to harness it for getting stuff done incidentally lags somewhat behind, nevertheless we've truly found ways of making some of it sort of useful. The internet, for instance, has changed our personal lives over the last 15 years.

About five years ago, in the world of commerce, small and medium enterprises picked up on the idea of using it to unhitch themselves from their in-house costly server systems and began pushing the complexity of hardware and software out through that Internet connection to third parties who - on paper, for the time being - could do a better, cheaper job for them. And now, according to a survey by Ovum released, multinational companies are piling onto that same bandwagon.

They called it "Cloud Computing, the Straightway Big Thing." There always has to be a Then and there Big Thing, clearly, to distract us from the Current Big Thing, which is never quite working out, whether it be the Open Systems of the '80s, "Objects all the way down" of the '90s or the craze for Linux and open source in general that began to take off in 2000 - which, as a matter of fact, as a Current Big Thing is anyway doing better than most.

The majesty of Cloud Computing

For the majesty of Cloud Computing, traditional three-letter acronyms, the TLAs that have propped up the industry since the earliest days, were no longer enough. Enter the FLaa, the four-letter acronym with two small "a"s in the middle.

There's "IaaS", where your hardware vanishes from your server room and reappears in virtual form at the other end of your Internet connection. "PaaS" does the same thing for the operating systems and software tools you were using. The then logical step, "AaaS" didn't hit quite the right note when pronounced as a word, so they dubbed it "SaaS", and now you're simply renting all your IT needs, so you can get on with your core competency.

There's a snag here. And it's nothing new and surprising. We ran into the same thing 15 to 20 years ago when the mania for "outsourcing" caught hold. It looked great on the spreadsheet, especially when the analysts talked of turning capex into opex and the agility with which we would be able to flex up and flex down. It sounded like taking our business to the gym for a workout.

The same deal with Cloud Computing?

Isn't this going to be the same deal with Cloud Computing? I put the question to Tom Stockwell, product director with Cable & Wireless, who'd commissioned the Ovum report, which - unsurprisingly - concludes that "Telecommunications providers are catching up strongly in user trust ratings as credible suppliers of cloud computing services".

He said: "This is one of the reasons that MNCs have been less mature in their migration to cloud computing than the SMEs," and went on to turn my question neatly wrong side out. "It's specifically because they have these long-term, deeply ingrained systems integrator/outsource relationships. It's created a sort of commercial contractual stickiness. That's the revenue cannibalisation challenge if they're going to migrate to a more flexible, more transparent, commercially agile cloud-based service."

There are few topics in the IT industry that are more divisive than the option of putting anything other than Windows on the corporate desktop.