As interest in the cloud computing space grows, and the technology becomes more mature and more widely deployed, I thought I would reach out to some of the leading companies in the space to see what their thoughts were regarding the opportunity that lies ahead for this market, especially in light of the current economic conditions facing businesses of all sizes.

 

Dennis Quan, Director of Autonomic Computing at IBM was kind enough to answer my questions. Quan has been active in IBM’s (News - Alert) cloud computing initiatives for the past few years, having launched the IBM/Google Cloud Computing partnership in October 2007 to empower the next generation of engineers with Cloud Computing resources and skills. Dennis was also instrumental in the creation of the IBM Blue Cloud initiative announced in November 2007, a multi-year effort spanning software, hardware, and services offerings for supporting clients’ adoption of Cloud Computing technologies. For two more perspectives on Cloud Computing, please see my interview with Salesforce.com's Peter Coffee as well as my interview with EMC's Chuck Hollis.

 

 

DQ: IBM has the most robust set of tools and services for companies to adopt enterprise-grade cloud computing. When you think about it, the technologies supporting cloud computing — virtualization, Web-delivered services, open standards and Internet-scale computing — are IBM’s core capabilities.

 

In a nutshell, IBM helps clients use cloud computing to make their IT operations more efficient in three key ways:

 

 

DQ: Yes, the applications layer of cloud computing is gaining traction in the market — certain applications are no-brainers to move to a cloud model, while others may never move. IBM Global Business Services works with clients to give them a clear assessment of which applications make sense to move to the cloud and whether they should use a public or private cloud model.

 

The amount of business and consumer innovation that can happen on top of it is limitless, including real-time collaboration and real-time business intelligence, to name a few.

 

DQ: Main benefits include cost efficiency (both capital and operational), decreased footprint on the environment, massive scalability, and flexibility to reallocate resources according to changing needs from the business.

 

Cloud computing will be a key enabler of the Smarter Planet vision, connecting billions of people, sensors and storage to powerful back-end systems that can enable better decisions to be made and reduce inefficiencies and waste. It will impact a wide range of everyday business problems, from real-time risk analysis in financial markets to secure online health record networks for reducing medical errors.

 

DQ: Large enterprises can take advantage of cloud computing in many ways: they can elect to receive certain services over the Web from a third-party “public cloud” provider, they can transform their own resources to create what we call “private clouds,” or a combination of both.

 

Today’s IT infrastructures were not built to support the explosive growth in compute demands, and corporate data centers have been running out of capacity around the world. Cloud computing helps organizations reallocate resources to create Internet-scale computing with a smarter, more flexible, dynamic infrastructure. It will also help business users get at their critical information and applications from anywhere using their connected mobile devices.

DQ: Yes, smaller businesses are seeing the same benefits of larger enterprises. Many business processes such as e-mail and ERP can be easily delivered via a cloud in a much more cost-effective way.

 

DQ: Clients are looking for technologies that help them save money in the long run, and cloud computing is certainly one model that would do just that. In addition, analyst firm IDC (News - Alert) forecasts that the use of cloud-based services will increase in 2009 despite, and because of, the economic conditions.

 

DQ: Cloud computing has already had a huge impact in the Web 2.0 consumer space. In the coming years we will see businesses adopting cloud computing — not only to become more efficient, but also to take part in a growing global ecosystem of innovative new services that will link entire industries, like smart power grids and secure online medical record networks.

 

DQ: A more mature cloud computing model will emerge in 2009 as an enabling force behind an increasingly interconnected world. When you consider the enormous amount of technology that needs to work together on a daily basis — worldwide banking systems, Internet e-mail services, billions of mobile phones, physical asset tracking systems (RFID) — the inter-dependencies amongst these systems that span the public Internet and privately-managed IT environments will require ever-increasing amounts of computing power, intelligent networks and sophisticated security protocols. Businesses, in large numbers, began to evaluate the cloud approach in 2008, and this year we anticipate significant growth in a “hybrid” cloud computing model — combining public and private cloud approaches — in order for businesses to address the increasing demands on their IT systems in an economic fashion.