Welcome to Cloud 2

[Nick]

Don Sambandaraksa in Singapore hears of a future in which many companies will own no IT assets

Published: 23/06/2010 at 12:00 AM
Newspaper section: Database
 
While the IT industry is talking about how to leverage cloud computing, salesforce.com is already talking of the next major shift, to Cloud 2, the social cloud.

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com: ‘‘We are in the era of Cloud 2, where Facebook has outpaced search and social networking has surpassed email.’’

Speaking at the IDA Distinguished Speakers Event in Singapore, salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said that the industry is today on the precipice of a major shift. The first generation of cloud computing leveraged new technologies to deliver software that is low-cost, fast, and easy to use on the desktop.

"We are now in the era of Cloud 2, where social networking has surpassed email, Facebook has outpaced search, and new mobile devices like the iPad have created entirely new ways to interact with information," he said.

"The end of legacy collaboration software like Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus Notes is here. Salesforce Chatter changes the game for collaboration in the enterprise - all without the cost and complexity of software."

Lindsey Armstrong, Executive Vice-President for Asia-Pacific and Japan at salesforce.com, said that the region continues to be the fastest growing area and that last year, the company announced a 55 percent growth in the face of what was a very difficult year.

It is the first cloud computing company to hit the $1.5 billion run rate. Last year it opened a new data centre in Singapore and next year will open another in Japan. Salesforce processes over 200 million transactions a day, 60 percent of which are via the API, which means not from within Salesforce.

Salesforce has also just announced a Google Toolkit to link into Google apps such as Google Wave.

A key development is how companies such as Accenture, Cap Gemini and Deloitte are focusing very much on cloud computing. Accenture has actually set up a "factory" in which they build applications for force.com.

Gatner has predicted that by 2012, 20 percent of companies will own no IT assets. "That either means they will go back to using a feather quill, or they will go to the cloud," she said.

Peter Coffee, Director for Platform Research at salesforce.com, spoke of what cloud computing was and the inherent flexibility as well as the future of the platform.

The US Census Bureau is required every 10 years to go out and count the people. Late last year, they realised that their current IT system was not going to be able to do the job. Six weeks later, they abandoned the plan. Six weeks after that, they wrapped up a custom force.com application managing 170,000 temporary workers in 2,200 organisations. The best thing is that after a year of knocking on doors, they will shut it down and it will cost them nothing.

"You can go from a moment of realisation to up and running in less time than you thought possible and when you're done, you can shut it down and not pay another nickel. If it doesn't meet those criteria, it doesn't deliver on cloud computing," he said.

Coffee cited another example of a company that did video delivery over Salesforce at 97 percent cheaper than what it would cost traditionally.

Thirteen years ago, Salesforce thought of an idea. Instead of exposing virtual servers, it decided to expose APIs (application programming interfaces), UIs (user interfaces) and a content library. Coffee told Benioff that if they were going to have developers give up control (of physical servers), then they needed to have some radically compelling benefits beyond just cost-saving.

Microsoft Azure is positioning itself as dot-net for the cloud. There are two problems. First is that there is a difference between widely used and widely liked. No developer today lies awake at night thinking about dot-net. Azure requires you to write a statement of policy on how to run your application in the cloud, akin to getting up in the morning and having to call the water company that one is about to have a shower.

Secondly, all the containers in Azure contain code from different pieces - database, middleware, sharepoint and more. These are not focused coordinated release cycles. Over 18 months, a given "product" keeps changing and never exists in the market as something complete at any one point in time.

There are three ways to measure a cloud. Zero, one and infinity.

Zero refers to on-premise infrastructure. If someone comes with a truck to deliver your cloud infrastructure or having to license new software, then the contradiction alarms should start going off. Cloud is about carrying nothing but the smile on the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.

One is coherence and resilience. It simply works and the users do not have to get up in the morning, pay a fee for the upgrade and run tests to make sure that the upgrade did not break anything.

For instance, a certain German software company rolled out a double-byte unicode upgrade to support foreign languages. The problem is that it meant a doubling in storage needed. Paying the upgrade fee was just the beginning, then there was the cost of more storage and then running regression tests to make sure nothing was broken in the upgrade. "It's the steaming pile on the doorstep model," he said.

Infinity refers to how the cloud must be scaleable and customisable. Before Salesforce, the industry believed that if systems are shared, then companies cannot do deep customisation. It took two years, but salesforce.com managed to separate the business logic from the infrastructure, and the rest is history.

Today Salesforce runs 77,000 clients off just 2,000 ordinary Dell servers, half of which are backup. By comparison, you can see an Azure data centre from space and it is the principle consumer of power from a nuclear power station.

"That is global warming data centre design and we cannot afford it anymore on a planetary scale," said Coffee.

Last year, Salesforce added VMForce so that standard Java could also run in its multi-tenancy environment and "VisualForce designs so people without programming skills can design applications. Converting a Java application to run in the VMForce cloud is easy as dragging an icon to a virtual machine instead of a physical one," he added.

"Cost reduction is oversold as a reason for cloud. If people want 1980s computing budgets, they can do that by going back to 1980s levels of computing. Rather, cloud is about radical improvements in ROI.

"People worry about security, but the reality is that they are at much greater risk from a lost laptop than a security breach. If anything for a company that has to prove compliance, simply switching to Salesforce sorts 80 to 90 percent of the compliance audit. The system is architected differently and such security cannot be had by taking old software and running it in a virtual environment."

Coffee spoke of the Chatter development zone and how Chatter was an API with a thriving community. "Chatter will bring more intelligence and semantic awareness to business applications than ever before," he said.

Asked about the overhead of developing in force.com as opposed to in Java, Coffee said he has been around when people introduced a high-level language called C instead of coding in native machine language.

He said: "People said performance will not be there. What happened was that the increase in productivity of the programmers far outweighed the performance hit. Today, C is considered low level. Similarly when Java came out, people said it was slow. The industry has been in this step towards abstraction forever and each time the performance hit is more than outweighed by the increased developer productivity.

"If you do protein folding, you won't do it on force.com or dot-net, you'll do it on a Cray."

In terms of developer productivity, the hardest thing is to stop doing manually what the Apex (Salesforce's programming language) code library has already provided in force.com. The environment is standard Eclipse and Apex is a Java family language, as is C#.

Today, Asia-Pacific is leading the way in development on force.com. It has 75,000 developers, or 30 percent of the total, and growth of customers and new certified apps coming out of the region is two to four times the rest of the world.

With regard to HTML 5, Coffee said customer preferences will determine what developers do, and what developers want will determine what facilities Salesforce will provide so that they can build faster and more predictably in force.com than on any other platform.

Asked about Sun-Oracle and HP-Microsoft, Coffee said the amount of talent devoted to preserving the complexity and delays of the traditional model and transport it all to the cloud was akin to figuring how to build a carbon-fibre pyramid. They are using the latest technology to duplicate the limitations of technology 20 years ago.

"Seamless transitions are overrated. If I want to get to the moon, I don't hire horiculturalists to breed taller trees. You have to climb out of the tree and build a rocket. Meanwhile, the other guys are stuck in really tall trees trying to figure out this and that," he said.

"Two years ago the old school vendors were saying you cannot do this or that in the cloud. Today, they are just saying that there are security concerns or that some are not yet ready for the transition.

"People take these perceptions as if they were valid objections. If you tell me people can't adopt the cloud because they hold misbeliefs, that's not a cloud problem, that's an education problem."

ที่มา: bangkokpost.com