[Amir Zmora needs no introduction on this blog. This time, he has a few clouded thoughts from MWC]
I just received an email from a friend of mine saying – in a nut shell – “Amir, Thank you for making me install and use Dropbox a few months back. My laptop’s hard drive died on me the other day and yet nothing is lost. I replaced it and got all my files back”.
Looking around us it seems like we should adopt a new acronym – EaaS, meaning Everything as a Service. It seems like we are all going to the cloud and that a company that has nothing to say about their cloud offering/strategy/plans is simply outdated. Now, one can say that Google’s latest outage of 40,000 (or 150,000, or 600,000 – depending who you ask) Gmail accounts is a red alarm for CIOs counting on cloud services but the fact that Google was able to quickly restore this data (think about what would happen if this happened in your organization’s servers) is the proof that the Cloud train has long ago left the station and many more are to jump on board.
Cloud at MWC
MWC is a good place to learn about industry trends and cloud was there big time.
Cloud Zone at MWC 2011
If once the solutions were split between those providing the platforms and those providing the applications on top of the platforms, this year I saw an interesting trend of infrastructure companies now providing complete off-the-shelf cloud applications and services for carriers as well as their own data centers. Companies such as NEC are moving up the food chain and into the cloud, providing complete cloud based applications and service offerings and they are not alone.
The NEC solution spans products and services that are in the data center as well as others that are out of the data center including:
- IT Platform (IaaS)
- NGN core infrastructure
- OSS for cloud + network
- Cloud Service Platform (PaaS)
- SaaS applications
- Call center & helpdesk
- Datacenter operations
- Desktop as a Service (DaaS)
- Gateway equipment
- End-user terminals & devices
NEC’s carrier cloud offering, MWC 2011
As it is hard for one company to provide all these parts of the solution through self developed products, we are starting to see echo systems created around such companies, with partnerships with smaller solution providers to create a complete solution.
This brings us to the question of video cloud based services. We would be happy to hear your opinion regarding the type of video services you envision being cloud based and the markets they will target.
‘Eaas’ is an interesting nomen clature. Good post. Sounds like Gmail’s offline tapes (old school method) came in handy during “cloud” crisis situation. The multiple copies of data at multiple data centers are still vulnerable. More robust security assurance is required to woo pramgatists, conservatives, and laggards. [ I am an early adopter by the way].
Thanks for your comment Sentil. To my view we are beyond the point of no return with regards to cloud. This is both in terms of adoption of cloud services by late majority and laggards and in terms of the shift of more types of services to the cloud.
Great article, great way to name everything. Google might of had and issue, they might have used an old school way to restore, but they certainly screamed the point of “You can never have too many backups”
Cheers
I agree with you Amir, I think we are beyond the point of no return with regards to cloud. Mvision are offering good cloud based solutions and its only a matter a time before more of these solutions are available. Thanks
You should say the train has left the station, come back around, and left the station again! The “cloud” is just a new twist on the old mainframe / dumb terminal model- though now we have extremely powerful “clients” everywhere. Wise people will STILL keep multiple backups of their own data, using the “cloud” for further redundancy, convenience, sharing, online apps.. etc. I have seen the “cloud” crash down when some heavy equipment took out the real power to the real data center running our application remotely, at a very inopportune time- with whatever backups (if any) unable to handle the workload. The “cloud” is just some one else’s servers somewhere else. I do not trust the local “IT” geniuses with my critical data, let alone “IT” geniuses down the block.