So what's this new buzz word... everyone has been talking about it...
Essentially what we are doing is taking our applications and putting them in a cloud. Cloud meaning highly available servers which are provided by huge service providers such as Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Now since I strongly believe that it is business that drives technology, it is the business side that we need to understand first. why do we need it. I have my servers in house, I deploy my apps on my servers, I control and maintain them then why would I want it to be on servers that others control? It is like the analogy that my valuables are in my house, how can it be a better idea to go and put them somewhere else. Well the answer to that question is another question. Do you put all your money under your mattress in your house? Or is it a better idea to go and put them in the bank?
There are many benefits in building the applications from the cloud. Let's take cost for example. The cost of hosting an application on the cloud is just a fraction of what you will have to incur in deploying the application on one of your in-house servers. Along with it comes the maintenance cost. Employing people to maintain the Servers, business continuity planning, and so on and so forth. The list goes on. The Cloud providers on the other hand can provide you all the same services at a fraction of the cost. They work on much much larger scales. So it makes sense for them too.
Another interesting perspective is that, let's say you are an application vendor. You go and talk to a customer to sell your app. Let's say you convince the customer in buying the app. That means you have convinced one person. The person who takes the decisions. Let's say he consults a team before he takes the decision. Even in that case you have convinced that team. And most usually, the people who make the decisions are not the people who end up using your app. And there is no way for them, yet, to find out whether or not the app is good enough for them in their context. So then you go ahead and deploy the app and then start using it. Then the users, find out how much the application was worth in their context and they may or may not like it. Although this is the model we have been working on all these years, it doesn't look like a very effective model does it?
Let's change the scenario. Same application vendor, but this time, he has his application as a software as a service, deployed on the cloud. He just has to go and say, "Well you don't have to guess, I don't have to convince you. Why don't you use the application yourself for a few days and find out?" The users use the app, they like it fine; if they don't, well they don't have to buy it. And of course there is the "pay as you go" model in Software as a service. Just stop paying when you stop using the software.
And the best part is you don't have to go fight it out with your IT for deployment. It's all there in the cloud...!!
