Economist Debates: Cloud Computing

There is an interesting debate under way over at Economist Debates on Cloud computing and whether it can be trusted. It pits Stephen Elop who runs the Microsoft Business Division (think Office, SharePoint etc) against Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com – as you can imagine, they don’t exactly see eye to eye.

Both have strong arguments and though I would naturally err on the side of Mr Elop I did find some of Benioff’s remarks to have merit, not least that the customer is the winner in the shift and the business model of the cloud is very attractive, particularly in today's economy.

The example of Starbucks building a new app with Salesforce in 3 weeks by using the cloud is a good example of the very agile nature of the cloud for new applications. My guess is the “old” systems, those that run Starbucks business, remain on premises. I don’t see businesses moving wholesale to the cloud overnight…or even over the next 5 years as it’s not a rip and replace solution. That may of course explain why Mr Benioff recently gave a talk titled "The Best of Both Worlds" where he announced on-demand applications and on-premises applications could work together.

I was left chuckling at anecdotal story about Mr Arora from Google. Evidently he stores all of his data in the cloud and was recently left boarding a flight without his laptop as it was stuck at security. Eeek….not a major issue though I guess as what would he have worked on when he got on board with no cloud connection? I know that’s changing of course with wifi in more and more places but there are still enough places where this is no connection or a slow enough connection. For that reason I prefer to have my data local and sync via the cloud. Oh and if you travel much around the world, you find the cloud isn’t quite as ubiquitous as many would have you believe. In fact you don’t have to travel far outside of London to find the cloud gets slow!

Enough of my ramblings…head over to the site to check out the debate and have your own say.