CAD in the Cloud

Focusing on the recent announcement by Autocad that they are going to follow a web strategy for their products we finally start to see engineering apps moving into the cloud. These were the ones that I feared would hold up the advancement to full cloud. With services like OnLive also expanding it is becoming clear that graphical applications no longer need to be positioned locally on the fastest box you can buy.

Indeed with the amount of processing available in the cloud it is likely that graphical apps delivered in this way will surpass the locally installed ones. These applications will also deliver a new degree of collaboration and maybe allow organisations to truly operate in a fully global manner.

The web programs will remove issues of software patching, whilst at the same time ensuring that all users are working on the same edition of the software.

Not only that but because these applications will require accredited logins to access them so pirating of the programs will become much harder, maybe even impossible. This will of course allow these companies to remove the work associated with protecting the products from theft massively reducing the price ;-)

This could be the start of the point where more complex users can become full cloud citizens, if the integrity of the data it uses can be guaranteed.

The "i" habbit

Today I found myself in a mobile phone comparison conversation. Unusually none of the people in the conversation were using iPhones and yet they were all very happy about that. Travelling on the train to London yesterday though iPhones seemed to be the device of choice. This could be down to the fact that todays grouping was all techies and they tend to be more motivated by technological cool than fashion.

What was clear though is that the iPhone has elevated smart phones to the device of choice, something I forecast in the early 2000’s. It took a ridiculously long time to get to this point and when it came it was the consumer pressure that forced the device into business. This was the opposite to the way that Smartphones were previously being marketed.

Flushed with that success Apple came up with the iPad, a media portal device with limited input capability that looked like a giant iPhone. Many commentators laughed and assumed it would never catch on, but as I expected it has become a staple of many houses. Though many houses have much more powerful laptops to hand the iPad with its always on capability has become the device to use. One colleague told me the other day that his gets at least 2 hours use a day but normally much more.

In corporate IT we have already seen the edges of this device making it’s way into the corporate world. Purist technologists will fight this, but they will be driven back by the weight of the corporate managers seeking to move the convenience of their home experience into the workplace. This will apply not only to the iPad but also to the plethora of other tablet style devices that are appearing. Microsoft’s Windows 8 will provide for much improved windows tablets but this is appearing quite late in the day and it is yet to be seen whether it will become a challenger. I hope it will because I need a tablet that I can write on, but I fear the “i” habit will by then be too deeply ingrained. If this is the case then we could be on the edge of the days where Microsoft’s operating system is no longer dominant.

If you are reading this thinking that corporate IT will remain the same despite all this you need to learn the lesson that Apple taught us. Every corporate user, no matter what their rank, is also a consumer.

The penultimate Cloud step

I have talked before about my views on private cloud, I believe in using the technology of the cloud in business just not that this makes it a private cloud. Whatever it is called though there is no doubt that making your business data centre behave like the Cloud has value.

It has operational value in the short term but in the long run what it is doing is preparing you for the trip to the real Cloud. It trains your administrators to work in this way, and your users to accept the underlying mechanisms but without having to risk placing your data out side of company control. It is this one risk that is holding back the adoption of the Cloud as a whole.

The Cloud vendors know this though and are working hard to clear away these issues. Eventually they will raise confidence in their services so far that companies will trust that their data is secured. Not only that mechanisms will evolve that will help you to buy a service from one vendor and then change vendor later in the day. I believe this will work something like it does with Mobile phone vendors today.

If you have implemented Cloud technology in your data centre then as soon as you have confidence in the Cloud you can just shift the internal services. The chances are this could be done pretty transparently possibly even without a service break. Whilst I still believe going to Cloud services for some services is right for a lot of companies right now, implementing your own Cloud Technology is a really good transitional step it that is a risk too far.

AAS and the cloud

I read somewhere once a comment that the cloud was a load of aas.  Today I was reading a document that had a table that showed the US  National Institute of standards and Technology’s definition of cloud computing referenced with the type of aas applicable.

The aas (as a service) tag has become common yet I was interested to see that my home computer is considered to be “Iaas on private cloud”.  This typifies for me the trend to reclassify everything that we have done in the computing world for the last 20 years as being cloud.  I cannot agree with this nor do I agree that there is any such thing as a private cloud.  The private cloud is simply technology implemented within a company that has the characteristics of a cloud service.  It’s relationship to the cloud is roughly the same as a generators relationship to the national grid.  Only a very snobby organisation would fire up the private electricity grid when the national one goes down.

The cloud is public and different because it is pervasive touching everything , not bounded by the walls of an organisation.  It’s public nature leads us to distrust it and in corporate IT we have to protect our organisations hence we need to do something that meets our requirements in a way we consider safe.  We have to balance this with the CEO’s desire to have “Cloud” because all of his contacts and magazine subscriptions tell him this is good, thus we call our solution private cloud.

Eventually mechanisms will evolve that will allow us to trust in the security and the privacy of the cloud and the need for “private” anything will go away.  There will be just the cloud, or more likely an interlocking series of melded clouds.  At that point we will look back a realise how old fashion we were being trying to maintain a separation rather than trying to encourage safety in a public world.

The incredibles

Ten years ago when I moved from small department IT into the world of corporate IT I heard for the first time the use of the word Architect in reference to someone working in the IT world. There was one person in the organisation that held that title, and he sat on the IS management team.

Recently I started a short period of work with a company that is at roughly the same stage of maturity as we were then but this time everybody is an Architect. There are Enterprise Architects, Technical Architects, Solutions Architects and so on going almost all the way down to calling the cha lady a beverages Architect. The truth is this is common in all companies anyone who is anyone is called an Architect.

Now leaving aside the fact that in the UK it is actually illegal to call yourself an Architect if you are not a member of the RIBA, this situation put me in mind of a film I watched recently. The Incredibles is about a superhero family in hiding, and it’s great. The thought it triggered was that in the film the bad guy wants to give everybody technology so that they can all be super heroes. His point is “When everyone is special then no one will be”.

I wonder if this is the case for the title Architect, and I wonder if this in itself makes it more difficult for us to achieve gravitas in the eyes of business units. If you look at the engineering world then being an engineer or a senior engineer is good. In fact many engineers do most of what Architects do yet they are proud to not be architects.

It seems to me that the separation should be between roles that think about how things should be done and roles that actually get things done.