"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, 'Look! This is something new'? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time."
These are the words, we are led to believe, of Solomon, as reported in Ecclesiastes. They were written down 3 000 years ago, and they have relevance today. If Solomon did indeed write these words, he was a very wise man.
They are well worth revisiting every time we see a new technology hyped. Most times, it is a reincarnation of something else.
Take cloud computing. It is nothing wildly new, even though it is being positioned as such.
Indeed, such is the hype around cloud computing that some analysts are speculating it will lead us out of the global recession.
Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and Google have raised the ante, to the extent that what was marginal is now mainstream. But let's analyse the future by looking at the past.
Cloud computing has its roots in the concept known as bureau computing, which goes back roughly 50 years.
Computers today are expensive, but back then, they were simply out of the reach of most organisations. Many understood they needed computing power to automate certain business processes, but they could not cost-justify the millions these behemoths cost, or to acquire and retain the scarce skills needed to run them.
So was born bureau computing, where customers would have aspects of their data processing jobs done by a specialist which had invested heavily in the minicomputers, printers, infrastructure and staff required to deliver the service.
Alongside this came time-sharing, where customers would buy a segment of processing capacity from a company which had invested the millions required to acquire and maintain a top-notch computing facility, along with the skills and infrastructure necessary to deliver a high level of uptime - as close to 100% as possible.
ASP, then SaaS
After this came the hype of the application service provider, or ASP. For much of the late 1990s into the early 2000s, ASPs were all the rage, but in SA at least they failed to gain traction: the cost and latency of local bandwidth were and are showstoppers, as was the lack of maturity of the local market.
In SA, the industry-definition model of SaaS is not going to work any time soon.
Richard Firth is CEO and chairman of MIP Holdings.
Scarcely was the notion of the ASP discounted than along came software-as-a-service (SaaS), with dozens of reasons on one side why it would work and an equal weighting on the other to say why it wouldn't.
In SA, the industry-definition model of SaaS is not going to work any time soon. Just to cast our minds back, SaaS first gained the attention of the market in 1961, when US computer scientist John McCarthy proposed the notion of computing delivered as a utility-type service at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
See, there really is nothing new under the sun!
It has taken us five decades since to get to a point where we can now give effect to this notion with cloud computing.
As we understand cloud computing in 2009, it is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources are provided as a service over the Internet.
Simply access resources
Users do not need knowledge or expertise in or control over the technology infrastructure in the cloud. They simply access the computing resources they need as and when they need them.
In SA, given the telecommunications track record of the NP and ANC governments, and Cosatu's and ICASA's political meddling, all one can say is: "Riiight!"
So it's a given that local companies cannot deliver or access cloud-based computing, as it is currently constituted.
There has to be a hybridised local variant of cloud computing that takes into consideration our own, unique circumstances.
Cloud computing in SA, I believe, should be delivered in line with the broad definition: customers don't have to concern themselves with the skills required to design, develop, deliver and maintain software infrastructure. They should not be exposed to the risk and costs associated a world-class, 100%-available, high-performance application that advances and fulfils their strategy.
In coming Industry Insights in this series, I'll outline just how such a South African-oriented cloud computing infrastructure should and can be built.
* Richard Firth is CEO and chairman of MIP Holdings.
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