There’s probably no more hyped word in the industry today than “cloud,” and thankfully this morning during the keynote session at Management World 2010 in Nice we were not discussing the cloud of volcanic ash currently hanging over parts of northern Europe. Rather, the discussion among several speakers turned towards the barriers and risks to moving to a cloud model and also the new business models and opportunities it will open up.
Sean Kelley, Global CIO of the Asset Management Division at Deutsche Bank, said that a financial services company like his lives and dies by its technology. “People say we’re in an arms race for technology relative to cloud, and we have to realize that enterprise customers are very different from regular customers,” he said. He added that the barriers to cloud include security, pricing and the absolute need to avoid lock-in.
Thierry Zylberberg, Executive Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at France Telecom, said that we’re used to living in a world of pipe and access, and now with cloud things are much more virtual. “Service providers are clearly trying to be much more than a dumb pipe, but it’s all about trust; they need to establish trust with customers by clearly setting boundaries.” He pointed out a recent customer win by France Telecom that will see the provider taking on all of the medical imaging for the entire Paris region, which brings up all kinds of trust, privacy and security issues.
Agreeing with the premise that security is key for the cloud was the third panelist, Gerd Leonhard, Media, Technology & Communications Futurist. “To make the cloud come to fruition, privacy and security are critical,” he said. “Over the next 25 years, your money, education, healthcare and entertainment will move into the cloud, so we need new business models that are web and cloud native.” He added that service providers will need to closely collaborate on these issues for everything to happen as hoped and planned.
Kelley went even further and predicted that sooner than we think we may be doing futures trading on computing, much like we do with energy today. “This could be the next trading commodity, but at the moment the cloud is cloudy,” he said. “The first step should be on the buyers’ side, where we have to be clear there are certain things we expect from our providers. If we get that right, then people can engage.”
Clouds will be on the horizon throughout Management World, beginning Wednesday and continuing on Thursday during the Enabling Profitable Cloud Services Summit.
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