The high costs of the cloud
How great is it that high-definition video is now portable? Thanks to cloud computing, superfast 4G networks and tablets with high-resolution screens, we can watch thousands of movies and TV shows in lush, beautiful clarity wherever we go.
In a way, that is pretty great, as the millions of people who have bought the new iPad with retina display and LTE connections have already seen. But in another way, it’s going to quickly become not so great: As hi-def video – or rather, the data bandwidth to deliver it – becomes a commodity for more people, that commodity will start to become much more expensive. Not just for consumers, but for the companies that will increasingly need more wireless spectrum and wired infrastructure to handle the surge in data demand.
Call it the curse of the cloud. The proliferation of online video services and portable devices to watch them on have added congestion to data networks even as wireless carriers impose fees on its biggest data users. According to Bytemobile, video accounted for half of all mobile data traffic in February, up from 40 percent only a year earlier.
And that was before the arrival of the new iPad, which has four times as many pixels as the iPad 2. More pixels can enhance hi-def video but requires more data. Demand for wireless data will rise even higher once more LTE smartphones – including, most likely, the iPhone 5 expected this year – start streaming video and other high-bandwidth content on them. If carriers are overwhelmed by the demand, as AT&T was with its notoriously unreliable 3G networks, wireless service will grow more spotty over time. But we’ll be paying more for it.
We’re already seeing some of this happening with the LTE iPads. Just ask the guy who used his brand new iPad to watch NCAA games while attending NCAA games, blowing through his 2GB allotment in less than two days. Or the USA Today columnist who says he did the same just by downloading apps. Meanwhile, complaints were surfacing on message boards that AT&T’s LTE networks were dragging in some urban areas as people played with their new iPads.
It won’t be just iPads and the next generation of iPhones taxing wireless networks. Apple is the first to offer an LTE tablet to the masses, but LTE Android tablets will follow, as will more LTE phones powered by Android, which runs on 51 percent of the world’s smartphones. Verizon, AT&T and Sprint have been building out their 4G networks for years, but Verizon recently warned that despite that effort, demand will outstrip LTE capacity as early as next year.
Tech wrap: Apple beats Google to the music cloud
Apple has completed work on an online music storage service and is set to launch it ahead of Google, whose own music efforts have stalled, according to several people familiar with both companies’ plans. The sources revealed that Apple’s plans will allow iTunes customers to store their songs on a remote server, and then access them from wherever they have an Internet connection and that Apple has yet to sign any new licenses for the service and major music labels are hoping to secure deals before the service is launched. Amazon.com launched a music locker service earlier in April without new licensing agreements leading to threats of legal action from some music companies.
Verizon gained wireless subscribers with Apple’s iPhone, but the device’s affect on its financials failed to impress investors. Verizon Wireless posted 906,000 net new subscribers, roughly in line with expectations. That was much better than AT&T, which added only 62,000 net subscribers in the quarter as it lost iPhone exclusivity. However, a key sticking point for investors when comparing the two operators was the fact that AT&T won more new iPhone customers in the quarter than Verizon. Verizon announced that it would sell a new version of the iPhone later this year that, unlike its current iPhone, would work globally.
The risky attempt by The New York Times to charge fees to website readers looks to be paying off, although it still faces stiff challenges in turning around a fall-off in print advertising revenue at its core business. The company gained more than 100,000 new subscribers since it introduced its digital subscription service on March 28, representing at least an estimated $26 million in annual revenue and trouncing early expectations for the service.
Disruption to Amazon servers that host Internet services took down a raft of social networking websites including social network foursquare and Q+A aggregator Quora. Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud,” part of the online retail company’s cloud-computing service that hosts websites for startups, experienced latency problems and other errors, according to Amazon’s status page. The latest update on Amazon’s status page said the company was “now seeing significantly reduced failures and latency and … continuing to recover. We have also brought additional capacity online in the affected availability zone.”
Cloud computing solutions have advanced beyond storage to the point where they now provide businesses with ways to improve operations, writes Microsoft’s Cindy Bates. Among her tips for businesses to get more from the cloud: Deploy cloud-based versions communication/productivity tools such e-mail, phone, chat, contacts, calendars, and document creation software to gain access to enterprise-level capabilities; if your business provides Web services to customers, moving applications to the cloud will allow you to scale them up or down depending on your needs and gives your developers more choice in where and how they manage, deploy and store data; and the cloud can give your business the ability to maintain a remote workforce. Workers can access e-mail, documents, calendars and more, as well as collaborate with colleagues through document-sharing programs and video conferencing technology, essentially experiencing “in-office” scenarios wherever they have access to an Internet connection, Bates argues.
“The Cloud” overhyped? Brocade says not there for business yet
Say it’s not so — ‘the cloud’ isn’t ready for prime time? That’s the view from networking company Brocade, whose marketing chief compared the hype to the rush years ago to call center outsourcing.
All those applications and data that live off your computer somewhere in the Internet make up the cloud, from Google word processing software to your home pictures and video, and it is hot, hot, hot. But Brocade chief marketing officer John McHugh told the Reuters Global Technology Summit in San Francisco that big business was not ready to embrace it for sensitive data and the most important applications.
“There’s lots of issues. They’re being skirted over because they are really tough and there are no obvious solutions for them today,” he said. It will take “years” before big companies do that with important data, he said.
The cloud company he envisions will have no hard assets, essentially being an all-Internet endeavor. “This technology really isn’t done yet,” he said.
The consumer side is moving more quickly. An avid iPhone user, he raved about the impact of mobile devices, to the point where they are threatening to make PCs obsolete.
“My home PC — I could very easily retire that in another year or two,” he told the Summit. McHugh’s PC still gets pulled out for complex design work, but for keeping contacts, writing notes, finding directions, even banking, it’s all gone mobile. “Did anyone really see that coming?” he asked.
from The Great Debate UK:
The future of computing is in the cloud
-Piers Linney is a self made entrepreneur and former City investment banker. He is currently Joint-Chief Executive Officer at Outsourcery, a leading communications and hosted IT company. The opinions expressed are his own.-
"Cloud computing" can sound like a very amorphous concept, perhaps even conjuring up images of important business data floating around in the skies above us. It often raises questions about control and security. But the reality is a lot more down to earth and it is quite simply the future of computing and the way in which businesses will consume pooled resources of software and hardware.
It is not a technology that is on the way or in "beta testing". Cloud computing uses tried and tested software that is just delivered in a new way. It is already empowering thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK while saving them money, increasing productivity and allowing them to get on with running their business instead of their IT.
The arrival of cloud computing - where software and hardware is pooled centrally and made available over the internet - has parallels with the early use of electrical power. When industry first started using electricity, each business had to build a generating plant.
This model was replaced with large centralised power stations with electricity distributed using the National Grid network - providing customers with "on-demand" power without any investment or maintenance costs and billing based on only what was used.
My business Outsourcery is a leading provider of communications and cloud computing solutions to 25,000 SMEs in the UK. We have two purpose built data centres, complete with security, 24/7 monitoring, expert staff, redundancy and real time back-up of systems and data across two sites that even most corporations could not afford. If one of our data centres was catastrophically destroyed, our customers would probably not even notice.
I have been involved in many start-ups and SMEs where looking after technology was a constant burden - involving the purchase of expensive servers and software and maintenance support.
It has even more parallels with the world of commercial time-sharing, which Mr Liiney looks as if he is too young to remember.Commercial time-sharing was unpopular because it was expensive. I can’t speak for Mr Linney’s offerings, but the cloud computing that most people experience is pretty expensive, cross-subsidised by other activities such as advertising. Subsidy is always popular at first, but rarely stays the distance.Commercial time-sharing was unpopular because of fears about control and security. I once worked for a company which found that all its intellectual property had disappeared overnight in a dispute with its service provider. Cloud computing offers no guarantees against that happening again. And just in the past month, there have been two or three frankly astonishing data outages which should never have happened in any sized business.Commercial and in-house time-sharing was unpopular because it was resource limited and undemocratic. DP departments thought they had the right to tell people what the CPU cycles got spent on. That’s why DP departments don’t exist any more. As the one-off benefits of virtualisation software products get spent, cloud computing will also inevitably become resource limited. DP departments are likely to reappear, at least in some form. DP departments are unlikely to be popular.
from Commentaries:
Twitter backlash foretold
Technology market research firm Gartner Inc has published the 2009 "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies," its effort to chart out what's hot or not at the cutting edge of hi-tech jargon. It's just one of an annual phalanx of reports that handicap some 1,650 technologies or trends in 79 different categories for how likely the terms are to make it into mainstream corporate parlance.
Jackie Fenn, the report's lead analyst and author of the 2008 book "Mastering the Hype Cycle," delivers the main verdict:
Technologies at the Peak of Inflated Expectations during 2009 include cloud computing, e-books (such as from Amazon and Sony) and internet TV (for example, Hulu), while social software and microblogging sites (such as Twitter) have tipped over the peak and will soon experience disillusionment among corporate users.
What's most interesting in the report, now in its 14th year, is what the corporate research firm says is a long way off from the mainstream.
It will take up to five years for many of today's trendy technologies to become mainstream, including Web 2.0, cloud computing, Internet TV, virtual worlds, and a true corporate mouthful, service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Funny how long hype cycles take to pay out. Three years ago, in its 2006 Hype Cycle Report, Gartner predicted Web 2.0 would go mainstream within just two years.
I, and many of my contemporaries in the IT field, do not believe a word of what Gartner and other so-called “analysts” have to say about technology trends. They and their ilk have been pitching Web 2.0 and other technologies for years, and have missed the mark time after time. It amazes me that there’s a lucrative cottage industry in making these “predictions”…
If you owned a business, and wanted to bet on what technologies are going to succeed, you would be better off going to Vegas and betting on roulette…
Sun CEO takes stage, ignores IBM deal talk
What do you do if your company is reported to be involved in an $8 billion acquisition and you’re already scheduled to give a big speech?******If you’re Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, you honor the commitment and then make a swift exit.******The pony-tailed CEO took the lectern on Wednesday at the Open Source Business Conference at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, his first public appearance since reports surfaced last week that IBM and Sun were in acquisition talks (reports that neither company has so far commented on).******While the putative deal has produced endless column inches of analysis and speculation in the business media, it had no place in Schwartz’s remarks. Instead, Schwartz spoke about Sun’s recently-released cloud computing service, largely rehashing talking points he made in an earlier series of blog posts.******The most intriguing nugget, for those running Schwartz’s comments through the filter of an IBM deal, was his characterization of Sun’s open source operating system as the “single most valuable” part of the company, as it represents the key building block for Sun to play in high-margin, adjacent markets like networking.******When his 30 minutes were up, Schwartz slipped behind a curtain and retreated backstage, conveniently avoiding any reporters in the audience eager for ask him about the IBM deal.******And when a couple of reporters greeted him at the hotel’s exit, Schwartz proved equally aloof – the surprised CEO was good-mannered enough to shake hands, but didn’t break his stride, or his silence, to answer a question about the progress of the IBM deal. Maybe next time…
What on earth is ‘cloud computing’?
Silicon Valley billionaire Larry Ellison shed a little sunshine on “cloud computing” on Thursday at a financial analyst meeting held by Oracle Corp, the software company that he founded and runs (when he’s not making into the headlines for his more nautical pursuits).
We’ve redefined ‘cloud computing’ to include everything we currently do. So it has already achieved dominance in the industry. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing.
The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Cloud Computing. I remember I was reading W and I read that orange is the new pink. And cloud is the new SaaS. (Software as a Service) Or cloud is the new virtualization. It is the most nonsensical. I mean I read these articles … I have no idea what anybody is talking about. I mean it is really just complete gibberish.
What is it? What is it? … Is it – ‘Oh, I am going to access data on a server on the Internet.’ That is cloud computing?
Then there is a definition: What is cloud computing? It is using a computer that is out there. That is one of the definitions: ‘That is out there.’ These people who are writing this crap are out there. They are insane. I mean it is the stupidest.
And he wasn’t done yet: “When is this idiocy going to stop?” And “What the hell is cloud computing?” followed. And then this:
We’ll make cloud computing announcements because if orange is the new pink, we’ll make orange… Okay fine, we’ll do some cloud. Maybe we’ll do an ad. I don’t know what we’ll do differently in light of cloud computing other than change the wording on some of our ads. It’s crazy. So that’s my view.
Still lost in the clouds?
Its funny that this is coming from Ellison who 13 years ago talked about a project that is similar to cloud computing:
http://www.usfca.edu/~morriss/478/projec ts_972/Introduction.html
