Information: the Real Cloud Computing
With all the talk of cloud computing from this vendor and that analyst, it is easy to naturally confuse the cloud with a series of scalable technologies interconnected via the Internet. But that really misses the point. Technology is just the miss. The real thunder and lightning comes from the information, and how companies put that together. Just look at MediaCloud, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University in cooperation with Calais, a semantic Web tool from Thomson Reuters.
In its early attempt to track online news content comprehensively, MediaCloud demonstrates the real power behind the cloud concept. There are potential economic and operational savings a company might see by making use of highly scalable data services on the web. But the real value the cloud is going to offer is the ability to combine information from different sources and gain new levels of understanding in such areas as strategic planning, operations, or market analysis.
Once you start thinking of the cloud as information -- to be pulled out via web page crawling, RSS feeds, emails, or anything else -- it becomes clear that thinking of the cloud as only supporting a single company's information resources is limited. Check the analysis that my colleague David Weir in BNET Media was able to easily undertake.
Another example using MediaCloud is my own experiment to see the ten most mentioned items on one of my regular online stops, Slashdot.org, which dubs itself as "News for nerds, stuff that matters." By that description, you might expect the most mentioned things to be technology. Not so fast (and apologies for the abbreviations, but this is how the items were listed on MediaCloud):
- United States
- Barack Obama
- California
- White House
- National aero...
- Microsoft
- Federal burea...
- U.S. government
- Yahoo
- Obama adminis--
Instead of looking at Slashdot, imagine the same sort of analysis being done on a prospect's web site, or looking at the associations with your brand name most frequently made on blogs or in discussion groups. To think of the cloud as information is to look beyond the four walls of your company and to interact with the rest of the world -- which is the first step toward commercial success. By talking about the cloud as technology, high tech companies are walking down the same line they have so often before, and that makes new concepts flop. It's not that the potential customers are deaf. It's just that the executives speak the language of business, not the language of technology. So try a little translation before pitching.
Cloud image via Morguefile.com user destinycole, standard site license.