The cloud is the hyped-up concept-of-the-moment to many, but industry players at Microsoft's TechEd Africa and Partner Summit, in Durban, this week, believe it is here to stay. They weighed in on where they think it's all going.
Martin Walker, Microsoft director of EMEA cloud partner strategy, believes there will always be both a public and a private cloud.
He sees a number of large cloud providers emerging who will offer generic public cloud services at very low cost due to economy of scale. Users with niche requirements will still make use of the private cloud - particularly for core services that differentiate their businesses. He believes the other areas, the context areas of business, will be mostly outsourced to the large cloud providers.
“It's a case of would you buy a cow to produce your own milk?” He said. “We're moving into this change of mindset where we've gone through this build phase into a buy phase.”
“Look at Web sites,” he says. “Years ago, if you wanted a Web site, you had to buy a Web server and set it up yourself; now you partner, and can have one in minutes. You don't need to know the tech behind Web sites to build one anymore. [It] will be interesting to see if we get a similar situation, where we get different kinds of partners from the cloud.”
Everything is becoming more digital and moving towards virtual, he explains, because the infrastructure cost for the end-user is minimal. It's the rise of everything as a service and, he says, the area Microsoft will be in for the next 20 years.
JJ Milner, MD of Global Micro, also believes there will be a few large public cloud providers that will dominate the public space, but that there is opportunity for smaller providers in local areas that service niche markets.
“Right now it's a land-grab,” he says. However, he believes the cloud will reorganise itself in ways we don't expect, and eventually “click and make sense” the way social media has in the last few years.
“We're going to have these new relationships, probably less controlled than people think,” he says.
He believes the cloud will become too complex for the customers to engage with directly, and they will look to suppliers for packages of services.
He uses the analogy of cellular providers who offer customers bundles with hardware, various services, and occasionally, special offers tailored to their specific needs.
Mark Reynolds, director of Microsoft small and medium solutions and partners, believes the cloud will fundamentally alter the way software companies do business in the future.
For one thing, there will be far less piracy, for it is impossible to pirate something that exists in a central location, and non-genuine copies of software will not be able to access that location. For another, businesses accessing software on the cloud will not need to worry about updates, as these will happen automatically, server-side.
“At the moment in South Africa, smaller businesses are using older technology, for example Microsoft XP, that's not designed for the world we're in today,” he says. “Cloud will let those companies take a decade jump.”
There will also be less of an investment upfront, so there is a lower barrier to entry for small businesses. A team of two people can start up a business on par with some of the biggest corporations in the world if they use cloud solutions, and they only need to pay for those solutions monthly, as they need them, Reynolds explains.
The question of the cloud is a big one, they all agreed, and no one can predict exactly what it will mean. All agree, however, that at the moment, businesses are viewing the cloud through the paradigm of what's already possible, looking to simply move what they currently do to a different platform. They have very little idea what might be possible in the future.
Walker points to the technology behind Kinect, to the business interactions that are possible through motion-sensing technology that wasn't even imagined a decade ago.
The example Milner uses is of social networks, that no one expected them to take off the way they did.
For Reynolds, it's Netflix, and the complete change in content provision that the world has witnessed in the past few years.
“The IT industry is used to change,” he concludes. “It should be able to adapt.” Whatever happens.
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