Creeva’s World 2.0

Pic­ture from here

I have a pro­found fas­ci­na­tion with cloud com­put­ing, inter­net com­put­ing, bam­boo­zled pro­cess­ing (what­ever you want to call it).  The prob­lem when you start using these terms in the IT world it becomes “Soft­ware as a Ser­vice” (SaS) in some attempt to legit­i­ma­tize the busi­ness model.   There is a dis­tinct dif­fer­ence, how­ever.   That dif­fer­ence is money.

“Cloud Com­put­ing” is still one of the ephemeral terms that no one is quite sure what it means.   It’s akin to the “Net­work Com­puter” model pushed out by Ora­cle in the mid 90’s — it’s all as hard to explain, ridiculed, ahead of it’s time, and under­stand­able as the Net­work Com­puter was.  The idea of cloud com­put­ing means why you process your data locally through some win­dow (Browser, Local PC) into the cloud (Inter­net), your data is stored in the cloud and acces­si­ble from any­where.  Terms like Web­mail have become keep­ing your email in the clouds — I like the con­cept but we are bring­ing back the 90’s terms about “think­ing out­side the box” with this type of label­ing.   Social net­works such as Myspace and Face­book are also con­sid­ered to be cloud plat­forms, I assume this means because you can annoy your friends any­where with appli­ca­tions invites — even if you’ve never met them in meat space.

Cur­rent def­i­n­i­tion essen­tially is if you are doing any­thing online except read­ing a sta­tic web page (library inter­ac­tion in the clouds?) — is con­sid­ered cloud com­put­ing.   Some peo­ple are refer­ring to any of this same type of activ­ity as SaS whe nit is in the IT realm.  It’s not, please change your word­ings, under­stand what you are talk­ing about, respect both the IT world and the non-IT world.  You are con­fus­ing peo­ple with con­cepts that are also com­plet­ley non-explainable already.

SaS is much sim­i­lar to cloud com­put­ing, much like a chee­tah (SaS) is sim­i­lar to a bob­cat (cloud com­put­ing).  Both of the lat­ter ani­mals are mem­bers of the feline fam­ily and have sim­i­lar body makeup, but we can also rec­og­nize that they are not the same and have vastly dif­fer­ent fea­ture sets.   A bob­cat is also more com­mon.  First I’ll say it, most SaS is bor­ing.  It’s the kind of stuff you do at work.  Whether it’s Peachtree’s online appli­ca­tion,  it’s the remote backup ser­vice and out­sourced server mon­i­tor­ing your com­pany pur­chases.   These are soft­ware pack­ages your com­pany can buy and man­age but they’ve moved them off site and out of their direct con­trol over the hard­ware.  It’s on the net­work and that’s all that matters.

SaS prod­ucts come with ser­vice level agree­ments that guar­an­tee up time and will com­pen­sate you for exces­sive (which is some­times 15 min­utes) of down­time.   I have yet to see a check from Twit­ter or Myspace, and I’m sure some users can show actual cause and effect of dam­age to their online busi­nesses if their is an out­age.   SaS is nor­mally pretty niche, costs money, and repli­cates things you already do.

I pay for Flickr?  Does that mean it’s an SaS?  No it doesn’t, the Flickr “appli­ca­tion” is free, what I am pay­ing for is stor­age space and a small num­ber of fea­tures — not the appli­ca­tion.  The same goes with Google Apps and Smug­mug.  If it’s a con­sumer grade prod­uct it’s still a cloud com­put­ing appli­ca­tion.  When we move into things like Microsoft offer­ing remote hosted MS Exchange pack­ages, we are enter­ing into SaS.