The move away from desktops is marketed as cost savings
ST. LOUIS – It may be bad news for the people in your corporate IT department, but much of their work may be moving to “the cloud.”
If the digital soothsayers are right, that personal computer in your office cubicle someday may function as nothing but a dumb screen. The real electronic brain – the computing power, the files and the software – will be far away in a bank of computer servers owned by another company. That computer bank is “the cloud.”
It’s a rapidly growing business – mainly because it promises to cut company computing costs.
Until now, consumers have been ahead of the industry in using the cloud. Email through services such as Gmail and Yahoo are cloud uses. Consumers who store photos on Shutterfly or track their finances on Mint.com are using the cloud.
“Consumers are far ahead of the enterprises in this,” said David Brown, president of St. Louis cloud provider Datotel.
Now business is getting into the act – creating opportunities for intrepid companies. Savvis, based in Town and Country, Mo., has been selling tickets to its digital cloud to companies worldwide. Its $40 million cloud business has been doubling every year.
“We’ll probably be disappointed if we can keep (growth) only to 100 percent,” said Savvis President Bill Fathers. “If we can’t make this a billion-dollar business in three or four years, then we’ve not been successful.”
MarketsandMarkets, a market research company, sees the global cloud growing from $37.8 billion in revenue last year to $121.1 billion in 2015. Other forecasts are similar.
The definition of the cloud remains a subject of debate. The most popular definition sounds like old-fashioned corporate outsourcing: Computer functions once done in IT departments are farmed out to a data center elsewhere. Customers use the Internet or cell connections to access their clouds.
A broader definition would include any storage of data on the Web, including now ubiquitous Web-based email accounts such as those from Google and Yahoo.
As the concept takes hold, consumers and business will access the cloud from smartphones, tablets or laptops from wherever they happen to be. Movies, photos, music, bank accounts, work documents and computer applications can be a finger tap away.
“You’ll pretty much have everything up in the cloud” said Joe Seibel, chief financial officer at Hexagrid, a Chesterfield, Mo., software company specializing in cloud computing. “If you have a phone, you’ll go over to your friend’s house and watch one of your movies.”
Last month, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced iCloud for consumers. They’ll be able to store their iTunes music, along with documents, pictures and video on Apple’s servers, and they’ll be automatically downloaded to iPhones, iPad tablets and home computers.
“We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device – just like an iPad, an iPhone or an iPod Touch,” said Jobs. “We’re going to move the hub of your digital life to the cloud.”
If consumers were first adopters in cloud computing, businesses are hot on their heels. The reason: The move can cut computing costs between 30 and 70 percent, said Fathers, of Savvis.
“As a concept, it’s been around for more than 20 years. It’s only in the last 12 to 18 months that the technology advanced so as to realize the promise,” said Fathers. “The underlying technology has gotten cheaper – things like processors, servers, bandwidth.”