Great news from Amazon Web Services (AWS) yesterday - they’ve made it easier to get your data up into the cloud.  All you have to do is ship them the raw SATA drive and they’ll plug it in.  Easy!  And they’re now accepting capacities up to 4TB.

This is why we work with AWS - they’re constantly raising the bar higher and higher.  They take care of the infrastructure, and we deliver the Platform and Software layers to our Enterprise Software customers.

Anyone out there need more than 4TB?

This announcement got me thinking about the other direction of the data transfer that still hounds Enterprise Software vendors.  Most vendors still deliver most if not all of their products as client-side installs. 

With the goal of lowering the cost of sales, software and tools vendors enable customers to download from their website (the cloud) evaluation versions of their products.  This would be fine if these distributions hadn’t grown to be hundreds of megabytes themselves!  A very large semiconductor vendor told me that it takes a customer 3 1/2 hours to download their software over a T1 line in North America.  And of course, it takes many attempts for it to be successful.  Not a scalable model and one of the many reasons why we promote moving evaluations and pre-sales training to the Cloud using Xuropa.

The reality is, this problem is only going to get worse.   (Numbers provided by OECD.)

WW Broadband Penetration, OECD 2009

Broadband Pentration Growth, OECD 2009

Software distributions are only going to get bigger, and with broadband penetration low and not climbing at a huge rate, something needs to change.  Of course, corporations will always be at the forefront of broadband adoption, but the rise of virtual teams and off-site workers will continue to exacerbate the problem of a lagging telecommunications infrastructure.

Although a full SaaS model would remove this problem.  There are many other obstacles and reasons why a complete move would not work for many of these software vendors.  However, moving the front end of the acquisition process (pre-sales training and evaluations) just makes sense.  Doesn’t it?

Posted under Xuropa, industry

There is of course still a lot of bluster surrounding Cloud Computing, and it will take some time before an agreed to set of definitions comes to light.  I particularly like the path that Phil Wainewright is charting though.  He’s been commentating on the space since the end of the 90’s and has a “no nonsense” approach I appreciate.

In an effort to simplify the discussion, a recent post of his, “When is a cloud not a cloud?“, begins to define different types of “Clouds” from the perspective of the original cloud - the internet.  He lists three different types - Captive Cloud, Public Cloud (AWS, the Xuropa Platform primary cloud provider), and Virtual Private Cloud (a “walled off” cloud within a Public Cloud, like AWS). 

The post is worth a read, but he starts to run aground on two points IMO.  Firstly, to isolate connectivity as the key defining characteristic is to emphasize what should be a “cost of entry” point, and glosses over real value differentiators (eg. resource management via API).  Secondly, he really does himself a disservice when he includes “Captive Clouds” as a type of cloud (even though he was trying to be ironic).  We already have a name for that - “datacenter”.  A collection of networked servers running something like VMWare behind a firewall is not a “cloud” of any description.  It is a datacenter with better hardware utilization than the datacenters of the 90’s.  That’s it.  To put the word “cloud” in the same sentence as “datacenter” reduces clarity rather than enhances it.

Posted under Xuropa, industry