SaaS Meets Cloud: Future Of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the buzzword in the IT industry today. Does cloud computing really have the potential to see mainstream enterprise adoption? What is the future of this model? Val Sribar, group VP-Application Research, Gartner, shares some answers with Biztech2.com in a conversation giving an in-depth insight into cloud computing.

Please talk about interoperability and SOA.

The first point to take into consideration is that if an organisation is going to do something many times and is looking at interoperability among various systems, having a service or a set of services that multiple applications can use gives a tremendous leveraging power and the ability to do things more quickly because everybody can pull that service. An organisation should ensure that the service so provided is of high quality.

The other aspect is that if there is some amount of commonality among things, then when a change is made, it’ll help all the different applications that are using that service. SOA is also important for interoperability when transactions are conducted between two companies. So, initially people think about interoperability among their own applications; however, very often in a business world, where an organisation is connected with suppliers and/ or customers, having a suite of services that they can use to tie the different systems together, offers a flexible way of conducting business. This is also the direction where all the value-added network providers are headed; they are vying to provide this binding set of services.

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Please talk about emerging, cloud-based service models.

Cloud services are going to emerge in three major layers. The simplest ones will be infrastructure services. The best example of this would be Amazon’s S3 storage service or their EC2 compute service. There are similar offerings from Microsoft, Google and the like. On the other end, there are services that are inclined towards the business applications side, which define the SaaS market. The most well-known player in this category is Salesforce.com with its sales-related applications set; however, there are also other companies such as Success Factor in the same league.

Then there are the sets in between the above two categories. The most mature set in between right now is of collaboration services. Many people use Webex, which is a cloud-based collaboration service and then there are the e-mail services. Gmail is a very good example of a cloud-based e-mail service and Microsoft has also announced its version of a similar offering. Eventually, there will be a whole suite of services that sit between the infrastructure and the business applications layers and these will relate to integration through the cloud, such as application platform as a service.

Where do you see cloud computing heading in the future?

The places that it looks favourable reside on the lines of what a Google, Ebay or Amazon has to offer. Their infrastructure is on a tremendous scale and the cost for those kinds of transactions and services is incredibly low, therefore there is a strong future for those models. The more an organisation runs into something that is so unique that only a few people will be interested in it and the design of the system is complex and does not scale well, it will not do well in the cloud space. Another aspect of this is that, if something goes wrong there isn’t much recourse. So, the more advanced companies are looking at how they can use multiple cloud services so if one goes down, the capability is still there.

What is your view on open source as a software delivery model?

We view open source as one of the topmost drivers of software. The places where it is the strongest and will continue to dominate is at the operating system and infrastructure level, this will include Linux and things around that. It will then move into areas such as MySql databases. We expect open source to have continued traction in these spaces.

It takes longer at the business application level. Our take on open source is that it continues to be a major driver of change, but for the infrastructure pieces, it will increasingly dominate how things work. It will also often end up inside other solutions. Open source is also important from a skills standpoint. It is going to continue to have a major impact because large parts of the world have very skilled people that are employed at a very low cost.

Are open source collaborative models a feasible idea?

Open source as an approach to building technological capability is a highly feasible idea. It is an interesting contrast to the way large organisations would build things. Obviously, all of them use open source too. The notion of having one party, who is figuring out and focusing all the efforts, in comparison to a loose community is good and we think both approaches work.

What trends do you see in the cloud computing space?

The on-going impact of open source, the whole concept of SaaS meeting the cloud will be a major trend. We see business processes and the business process management work, information management and enterprise applications management increasingly overlapping. This creates entirely new capabilities around performance management and takes the ability to access information, make decisions and then go back and execute them to a different level. So if you put information, BPM and SOA together, it gives the ability to understand not only what is going on but also what needs to be executed.