The CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer got this year’s slogan going with a bang, “We’re all in!” he cried to the crowd early this year. It’s a poker analogy of course. “All-in” refers to betting all of your chips; putting all your money on the next turn of the cards. You’re betting everything that you’ve got the winning hand.
What Microsoft has been betting on is moving many of its products to the “Cloud” where users can consume them online. As I was talking about this new message of Microsoft’s to my wife it prompted the obvious question, “What is the cloud?” I had to think about it a minute. What does the IT industry mean when we talk about Cloud Computing and what are the implications to the project management software industry and to project managers in general? First of all, like almost anything in the IT world, there are numerous meanings; the cloud designation comes from network diagrams which had to depict connections to something out in the Internet.
So the “Cloud” can just refer to the Internet in general as in “somewhere out there”. In recent years though, applications that have been only available via the Internet have sprung up. There are numerous examples. Salesforce is a CRM, Contact Management System that isn’t installed at your local office. You pay a subscription as an organization and then access the application through your Internet Web Browser online. Google Apps is a suite of Applications such as Word Processing, Spreadsheets and Presentations that is available only through your browser. Microsoft’s office.live.com offers Word, Excel and PowerPoint this way also. Almost everyone knows about Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or Google’s Gmail. These are all Internet-based email systems that you don’t install in your office but rather access through an Internet browser or application of some kind. All of these examples are applications that live “in the cloud”.
One of the big concerns over cloud-based applications has been the security of the information. As many of us have seen in the past, social networking systems like Facebook are having its clients pay for its “free” service with a bit of their privacy. So, a new term sprang up, “private clouds”. This seems like a contradiction in terms but actually it’s referring to something of a mix of terms. A private cloud application is one which is not installed on your premises on your own servers, but rather is installed on the servers of a service provider who dedicates that server for your organization’s use. So, the privacy of the information, even though it is being transmitted in some way over the Internet, can be made much more secure.
OK! So that’s cloud computing, but I’ve yet to mention project management applications. Don’t worry, they’re there. There are a number of project management applications that are made available in both the Internet Cloud and Private Cloud models. Many clients we know are now having their enterprise project management applications such as Oracle’s Primavera or Microsoft’s Project Server hosted by a third party service provider. There are also software vendors who have designed their whole application to be available only through online subscription and your Internet Web browser. Take a peek at Canada’s AceProject based in Quebec city or Daptiv based in the US in Seattle. There are many more examples which you can find easily through an online search.
Your own applications, even though internally developed can also be moved to the cloud. There are many environments to choose from. Take a peek at Amazon’s EC2 Elastic Computing or Microsoft’s Azure environments, for examples. You can get your own virtual server at Amazon or a complete computing environment at Microsoft. More and more organizations are finding it attractive to offload their capital costs to such services in favour of regular operational costs as a method of improving cash flow and not tying up working capital in actual equipment. “Shift your CapEx to OpEx” say the salespeople.
