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IT: Cloudy days ahead

While the hype is yet to subside and there are a number of questions yet to be answered, it is slowly becoming mainstream

In the information technology industry there has never been a dearth for buzzwords.
While the decade that just went past us began with Y2K, it was quickly followed by SOA, BPM, RIA, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 – the list goes on. But the end of the decade heralded a new buzzword that has since been much talked about, written about, sliced and diced in all possible ways – yes, I am talking about "cloud computing".

Cloud Storage: No more a security nightmare
While the hype is yet to subside and there are a number of questions yet to be answered, it is slowly becoming mainstream. All indications so far suggest that cloud computing is here to stay and is going to have an impact on all aspects of IT.
While there are many definitions of cloud computing, the one that I think makes most holistic sense is the one given in Wikipedia: "it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer need knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them".
In the first wave of outsourcing enterprises outsourced non critical IT tasks such as application maintenance and in the second wave business processes that are of not any competitive advantage (example, payroll processing) were outsourced.
Cloud computing could bring in a third wave, where non-critical data and computing will be outsourced. While this is not entirely new (Salesforce and Google has been there for many years now), the impact is going to be more widespread.
Cloud computing platforms now offer the CIOs a much wider avenue to look at enterprise applications and data. This will force future IT strategies to include cloud computing and decide what needs to stay within the enterprise's data center and what can be migrated to the cloud.
Cloud computing does not necessarily mean access is always over the Internet. Therefore infrastructure may need to be relooked at in the form of 'private clouds' that could host multi-tenant applications and data stores.
Advances in cloud computing also provide an opportunity for product vendors to look at web as a primary (and increasingly the sole) channel for delivering the functionality and services. Products delivered over the cloud are automatically deployed and therefore delivery becomes a non-issue.
The maturing of web 2.0 technologies and RIA has made the browser to give as powerful a user experience as a traditional smart client does. More and more ISVs are adopting this route. For certain other products, such as middleware softwares, cloud computing paradigm offers fresh challenges.
These softwares now need to manage integration of enterprise and cloud based application. As cloud computing becomes more prevalent, there will be business processes that will span across the enterprise as well as cloud and middleware softwares will have to evolve to support this paradigm shift.
Application development is another area that will be impacted by cloud computing. Developers will have to start learning and experimenting with cloud based technologies such as Microsoft Azure. Development and deployment on the cloud tends to be a lot easier where you bypass the entire hardware/software approvals and procurement process.

Conventional IDEs are evolving to support this new paradigm. Software engineering processes will have to be revisited to account for cloud based application development. In the cloud, basic software development lifecycle activities such as configuration management, build and release management, performance testing, etc. have a whole new dimension.
In the pre-cloud days, developers used to worry about interoperability between multiple technology stacks and platforms. With cloud in the picture, interoperability and integration will have to be looked at from a new perspective.
Cloud computing will also have an impact on IT service providers with newer opportunities in the cloud space. In the early days of cloud adoption opportunities might be related proof of concept development, prototype development and may be even platform evaluations. But as the platforms mature, there will be opportunities for migration of traditional custom enterprise applications, data and storage to the cloud.
There will be integration and business process management opportunities that will involve applications running in an enterprise's data center and public cloud based applications.
While cloud computing could bring about a vast array of innovations and will have a widespread impact across the information technology landscape there are several concerns surrounding cloud computing that will have to be allayed before we see full-fledged mainstream adoption. The most important ones are around security and reliability.
How secure is the data that is stored on the cloud? How is the user privacy maintained? How are SLAs defined and met? Recent outages of public cloud infrastructures including Google and Amazon does not build confidence in the new paradigm. There are other concerns such as lack of standards for interoperability, and potential vendor lock-in.
But even with some of these concerns, the advantages that cloud computing offers outweigh them. This is a computing paradigm that offers great promise and one cannot choose to ignore. So better prepare for the cloudy days ahead!
The author is head of Collabera Labs.

New controller-free video gaming sys from MS

Also announces a number of new games for the Xbox

Microsoft has announced Project Natal, a new controller-free video gaming system, which reads a players body movements with cameras and mimics them with avatars on screen, will be available for purchase by the holiday season this year.
The announcement came at the opening of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)here.
 
Microsoft has demonstrated the system at another trade show last year, but had not set a release date until Wednesday. It is still unclear how much the system will cost, although Microsoft says Natal add-ons will work with its existing Xbox 360 gaming console.
Robbie Bach, Microsoft's president for entertainment and devices, announced a number of new games for the Xbox, including a new edition of the popular game Halo, which is due out in the spring.
"What Star Wars is to film and what Harry Potter is to fantasy books, Halo is to the gaming industry," he said.

MySpace announces developer challenge

 MySpace announces a developer contest to find new developers to write compelling applications on the MySpace social networking platform
The social networking site MySpace has announced developer challenge for developer community to find new developers to write applications on MySpace.

In a blog post by Amy Walgenbach, a spokesperson for MySpace said, competition is aimed at encouraging further innovation from the developer community. We believe the best onsite and offsite integrations with MySpace are not here yet and the MySpace Developer Challenge intends to find them. We also want to reward innovative developers big and small and recognize them as much as we can.

The contest enable developers to create new MySpace application, integrating our Real-Time Stream API, Open Search API, Photo Upload API, or by integrating MySpace on the iPhone.

Elaborating on time-frame, criteria and rules for MySpave Developer contest Walgenbach said, The challenge also features monetary and promotional prizes, to be given out to those developers whose submissions are picked by our panel of judges.

The categories for MySpace Developer Challenge includes, Most innovative use of the Real-Time Stream API, Best new MySpace app, Most innovative use of the Open Search API,  Most innovative MySpace Integration on Mobile and Most innovative use of Photos.

Submissions for the Challenge will be accepted January 4 through Feb 24, 2010 and winners will be announced at the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco in March 2010 added Walgenbach.

Dell's slate runs on Android

The company announced the arrival of this new gadget at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas

Dell Inc showed off a small slate computer that it could bring to market this year, exploring yet another type of device designed for computing on the go.
So-called slate and tablet PCs are a hot topic at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, ahead of a highly anticipated device from Apple Inc that is widely expected to be unveiled in late January.
Dell's slate has a 5-inch screen and runs on Google Inc's Android mobile operating system. Dell declined to provide other details, or say definitively if the new gadget, which looks like a large smartphone, would hit the market.
On Wednesday. Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer displayed a Hewlett-Packard Co slate that which was considerably larger than Dell's.
Michael Tatelman, Dell's vice president of consumer sales and marketing, said the company is testing a number of different screen sizes as it pushes further into the mobile market.
Dell recently released its first smartphone, the Mini 3, which is on sale in China and Brazil, and will be available in the U.S. on AT&T Inc's network.

FB.Me ' The shortest link to Facebook

Largest social network uses .ME to provide easy access for users on the go

In a world where every character counts, .ME is helping Facebook save its more than 350 million users valuable digits, with the launch just weeks ago of new URL shortener, FB.Me.

Facebook fuels jealousy in relationships

Millions of Facebook users post status updates, share photos and comment on friends' posts using mobile SMS products on a regular basis. FB.Me provides a simple and secure solution for increasing the amount of content users can view in those constrained environments.

"We could not be more pleased with Facebook's choice of dot-ME as the domain extension for its URL shortener," says Predrag Lesic, chief executive officer of the .ME Registry.

Demand for iPhone apps passes Facebook

"For the social media site's vast community of users, the benefit of using this shortened URL is immediately clear and the increased awareness of dot-ME as a domain extension will be astronomical. It is a win-win," he added.

"Its hard to believe dot-ME launched only a year and a half ago," adds Lesic. "In that short amount of time, our ccTLD has become an integral part of Internet identities for so many online businesses, bloggers and personal Web sites worldwide. Clearly, they see the intrinsic value of the extension's personalized branding and ability to instantly create a 'call to action' using minimal characters and maximum impact."