Stuart Lauchlan: The Year of Living Interestingly
In this issue our guest contributor is Stuart Lauchlan, a respected technology editor and founder of the businesscloud9 portal. Stuart talks about the increasing acceptance of ‘The Cloud’ across the business world, including ‘buy-in’ from no less than the UK's public sector which sees it as a means to deliver cost-effective essential services.
This is the year of Cloud Computing! That was the mantra repeated by so many commentators at the start of 2009. It was the thought that was running through our minds when we launched BusinessCloud9 (www.businesscloud9.com) as a dedicated portal to cover all aspects of The Cloud revolution.
But even though we knew there was a need for such an independent news and analysis site, we have been pleasantly surprised by the speed at which events have overtaken us. When the site launched we had the support and backing of firms such as Salesforce.com – Marc Benioff was one of our first external opinion/blog contibutors – but there were many firms whose commitment to Cloud Computing was, shall we say, less than whole-hearted.
But since then, the pace of the Cloud movement has been such that we're almost talking irresistible forces and immovable objects coming into sharp collision. We knew that Cloud Computing was getting enterprise-level, big ticket backing from major organisations like Japan Post and The Telegraph Media Group. But we couldn't have imagined a year ago that the UK government would decide that it's time to stop throwing away billions of pounds of taxpayers money on failing on premise IT projects and back the creation of a public sector Cloud to deliver essential services.
A year ago, we had enthusiastic, near evanglical, words from Cloud pureplays like Salesforce.com and Workday and Zuora, but we still saw reluctance and hesitancy from the established old world order. Where was the backing from the likes of Oracle and SAP? Neither seemed likely to be persuaded to 'come out' any time soon?
How things change! SAP, after a near-Pauline conversion, has a professed born-again enthusiasm for Software as a Service and while Oracle still defines it Cloud commitment as "A little bit" (in the words of Larry Ellison), it's clearly shifting its stance considerably.
OK, there's a way to go. The UK government says it's going to roll out a public sector Cloud, but there's a long way to go until it's a reality. Oracle and SAP make resassuring noises about The Cloud, but press releases come easier than product development. Agendas are still being set and battlelines drawn up. We do, as the cliché goes, live in interesting times.
At BusinessCloud9, we're keeping a close eye on all such developments and providing commentary and analysis on them. On December 2nd, we'll be hosting a one day conference in London which we hope will be the climax to a year that will have more than lived up to its initial promise as the Year of Cloud Computing.
Comments