May 21st, 2009 |
Every few years I make the trek to Las Vegas to Visit our sister event, Interop. Much like Las Vegas, Interop was a bit of blur of innovation and I am leaving with a bit of a cloudy head, but not the kind of cloudy head you might be thinking of.
First, Interop is the grand daddy of all shows in the technology industry. This is the place where companies sell uber-solutions to uber-geeks, where technologies can be promoted using a standard elevator pitch and fistacuffs (No, seriously, see Xirrus’ “Melée at Mandalay”: Xirrus, Booth #1331). Outside of the excitement of the trade show floor, on the floor there was a palpable tension in the conference rooms. Thanks in large part to the doom and gloom of recession talk, the real “melée” at Interop, for me, was the collision of inventive sellers with desperate buyers looking to save their way out of a recession with IT solutions. Times are clearly tough, but many here see technology as THE means to getting onto a more profitable path.
Everybody here is talking cloud computing. Interop dedicated keynotes, a conference stream, an “unconference” (which you’ll see at GTEC too, in ‘09), a networking night and an exhibit area to the cloud. In the conference rooms, most delegates admitted that they are only starting to leverage computing in the cloud, but Interop’s attendee survey showed that 40% of them planned to invest in it within the next year. While some of the interest is definitely from technology enthusiasts, I got the sense that most CIOs are having a hard time ignoring the cost-benefit analysis supporting the cloud. (Here’s a link to some good information from the Enterprise Cloud Summit).
Putting my public sector hat on, I was impressed by IBM’s VP of Cloud Services, Ric Telford, when he told the story of the Pike County School Board, an IBM client that virtualized desktop computing in their schools. This was not really earth shattering news, until he dropped the statistic that the board cut desktop computing costs by 62% through the virtualization process. Any parent with kids in school can relate to the value of a 62% savings for cash strapped public schools.
Pike County is only one of many examples presented at Interop. It’s also one of many news items on the cloud that has crossed my path in the last week or so. And, it’s not all just “business” news. Last week, the US government issued this RFI. This week, Fast Company has named the CIO at the US Defense Information Systems Agency, John Garing, as one of the top 100 most creative people in business. Why? Garing was said to have “powwowed with such luminaries as Amazon’s Werner Vogels and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff to bring cloud computing, network services, and Web 2.0 tools to the Department of Defense.” It seems to me like everyone, small or large, is taking a hard look at cloud computing.
My point is that cloud computing is clearly “the” hot topic right now, but Canadian governments who are not already looking into cloud computing might want to start paying attention to what others are doing. If technology is really the enabler of government services, it might be time for government CIOs to get their heads around the cloud as one of the next big things in service delivery.
