IBM’s Telford: expression ‘cloud computing’ on its way to obsolescence

Telford looks at adoption of cloud computing as "industrialization of IT"

Ric Telford, VP of cloud services at IBM, has no doubt that wide-scale adoption of cloud computing will occur in the near future. “In five years, we won’t even be using the word ‘cloud.’ It’s going to be the way we do IT.”

First, the process of “industrialization of IT” has to occur, Telford said during a keynote speech at the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara, Calif., Wednesday. Much like the development of assembly lines for automobiles in the first decades of the 20^th century made the manufacturing process more efficient, cloud computing, through convergence and standardization, will bring efficiency at mass scale to the delivery and consumption of IT services.

“Cloud is a change in delivery model,” Telford said. “It’s not a technology.”

Most IBM customers that are looking at leveraging cloud computing in any of its multiple forms are looking to cut cost. Other benefits sought after include investment flexibility enabled by making IT capacity an operational expense instead of capital expense and workload optimization.

While interested in different delivery models – private cloud, public cloud, hybrid, etc. – all IBM customers are looking to gain the same benefits of cloud computing.

IBM, having offered private cloud services to customers for some time, has been working on a public cloud service and, acting on its observations of demand trends, launched its public cloud service for testing and development this Tuesday. Infrastructure supporting the service (currently in limited availability) is in the company’s newly launched data center near Raleigh, N.C.

While security and control issues remain at the top of IBM customers’ minds when thinking about the cloud, other issues still need to be resolved with all the various cloud delivery models before the “industrialization of IT” takes place. They are interoperability and standards.

Since cloud computing is a delivery model, both providers and users have to encourage a more granular understanding of the true cost of running applications in the cloud, according to William Louth, CTO of JInspired, a provider of Java enterprise application management solutions.

“We need to understand the processing consumption, in terms of the application, that these machines are offering,” Louth said. When companies are developing applications, they need to know what these applications’ IT consumption costs are going to be.

“What are the activities and what are the resources that they’re consuming.”

Answering three fundamental questions can help: 1) What is coming in? 2) What types of processing goes on? 3) What is the output?