Cloud Summit Executive: Can anyone define cloud computing?

Last week I attended the Cloud Summit Executive at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, which is a great venue for a computing conference. I went into the conference with only a nebulous idea about cloud computing (pun not intended) and SaaS (Software as a Service), so I was looking forward to getting a clearer idea of what exactly that means.

The chairman of the conference started by saying that he asked 20 people what cloud computing is, and he got 22 different answers. I thought I heard that wrong, but he repeated those numbers later, so I guess some people were either so enthused about cloud computing that they gave two definitions, or they were that confused. In any case, he promised that we’d get a real definition later.

The first speaker showed a scrolling list of companies already “on the cloud.” They went by so fast, but here’s a list of the few I caught: Flickr, Wikipedia, Skype, Gmail, Basecamp, Pandora, digg, and Remember the Milk. It was quite an impressive list which definitely gave the cloud concept more weight. But the speaker still gave a warning about considering the cloud to be the panacea for all enterprises. He reminded us of the time when e-commerce became the big buzzword and people were speculating that soon we wouldn’t have anymore brick and mortar stores, but we see now that wasn’t the case. E-commerce is an important part of business, but it isn’t the only part.

While all this was fascinating, I wasn’t sure I really understood it all since I was still waiting for a definition of cloud computing, but the speaker promised that we’d get it by the end of the day.

Turns out it was a long wait. Cloud Computing didn’t get defined until 3:25pm (yes, I checked my watch). Even then the two panelists gave two very different and vague answers.

Even though I did not get a clear definition of what cloud computing is, it doesn’t mean that the day was not informative. It was really interesting to hear different companies talk about how they integrate different parts of a company together.

For a really simple example a company may have a website that sells a product and it needs to integrate with the payment services. Instead of having to have a programmer write code to make the e-commerce platform talk to the payment system, they can use existing API and pre-programmed GUIs that will allow someone to drag and drop the different components and everything invisibly and seamlessly just works.

This is especially helpful to small businesses.  You can use different software applications or web-based applications to handle the various functions of a company, such as payroll, billing and shipping without too much effort.

For large companies it was projected that getting a single business suite that can be used to manage every part of their business model would be 5 years out.

So, how useful all this will be in the future? I think one of the moderators said it best: So Silicon Valley is either way ahead of everyone else or hurtling down a blind alley. Only time will tell.”

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2. Interop NY 2008: What is SaaS (Software as a Service)?
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5. Win Full Ticket to Interop New York 2008