This week I have taken part in two executive roundtable discussions on cloud computing. The sessions were hosted by Fronde and myself and Google’s Richard Suhr were the speakers. Steve Graham and Rob Old from Fronde opened the sessions with a YouTube clip of a full-on ice hockey fight implying to the audience that they were about to witness an epic slug-fest. Fortunately for the attendees (and my delicate disposition) nothing of the sort eventuated and the reason for that is that it turns out the respective visions Microsoft and Google have for cloud computing are more closely aligned that you might expect (OK, I will admit I was kind of surprised too).

I made the point at both sessions that I think “cloud computing” is like “interoperability” in that it’s a very top-of-mind topic at the moment but there are widely varying views on what the terms actually mean. The fact that Richard and I spent 90 minutes or so per session discussing our respective viewpoints, highlighting the commonalities between them and answering a wide range of really good questions and comments (rather than having the aforementioned slug-fest) went, I believe, a long way towards helping the attendees understand things a more clearly and, hopefully, provoking them into learning more and starting to look at how the technology might be applied to their businesses and agencies.

We only had 15 minutes each in which to present because what we were really there to do was provoke questions and conversation among the audience (which I think we did a pretty good job of). The key points that I made were something like this:

#1: ‘Cloud computing’ or ‘software as a service’ is an option which is rapidly becoming viable for a wide variety of customers.

• It is an “and” technology rather than an “or” technology in that it’s an additional option and it’s not going to wipe out existing options any time soon

#2: ‘Cloud computing’ is a broad term which encapsulates a number of components including:

• finished services e.g. Exchange Online, Office Live Small Business, Windows Live
• attached services e.g. Xbox Live, Exchange Hosted Services, Windows Live OneCare
• vendor building blocks e.g. Live Mesh, Silverlight Streaming, Virtual Earth
• “raw”, scalable infrastructure e.g. Amazon EC2 and, perhaps, others 

• the example I used for this was Microsoft Exchange where customers can choose from hosting the servers themselves, outsourcing to a local hoster, outsourcing to an overseas hoster, outsourcing the hosting to Microsoft or a combination thereof (see below)

#4: One of the key benefits of S+S is that it provides customers with choice and it enables them to move their infrastructure into the cloud and back again as and when required

• a great real-world example of this is a global customer I have been talking to this week who are interested in outsourcing their email infrastructure. Having it hosted in the cloud makes a lot of sense for many of their subsidiaries however there are some which don’t have access to the requisite bandwidth etc. For those offices it makes more sense for them to host their own Exchange servers. This ‘mix and match’ approach provides the customer with the best of both worlds while leaving the door open to changes (in either direction) in the future

#5: Many vendors are already utilising this model

• the example I used was Apple who have done an amazing job of combining hardware (an iPod or iPhone), client-side software (the software running on those devices) and a service (iTunes) to provide an incredibly popular and customisable user experience. Apple regularly update their client software (a little too regularly at times if you ask me) and there’s no technical reason they couldn’t make iTunes available in Apple-owned datacentres in NZ or even on servers owned by large local companies (e.g. Telecom or Vodafone or TradeMe). I’m not saying they’re going to do that (but if they do head down that path remember that you read it here first) however the S+S concept is a powerful one which offers new choices for customers and new opportunities for vendors.

So why are Microsoft and Google so much in alignment on this ? I think there’s three fundamental reasons. Firstly the S+S approach makes logical sense. The customers we talked to this week understood the vision and the options it offered them. Secondly, there are very few companies on the planet who have the expertise and deep pockets needed to build out the infrastructure required to realise the S+S vision. Microsoft and Google are definitely two of the biggest and there’s only so many ways to build highly-efficient, scalable and ultra-reliable datacentres and infrastructure. Lastly, there is a market share play underway here. It is increasingly clear that the software marketplace of tomorrow will include a combination of local compute power supported by a huge cloud based infrastructure. You’re going to see an increasing number of companies position themselves to deliver against this broad spectrum of users requirements.

The reality is that Microsoft and Google will be battling it out at a product level for years to come however I believe the way in which we jointly see the move to cloud computing is a lot closer than most people may realise. The fact that the two biggest players in this space are heading in a similar direction while competing vigorously around innovation and service offerings is an incredibly good thing for customers in general. When it comes to cloud computing we’re at the beginning of the beginning and interesting times lie ahead. For those of you interested in this space I would recommend you keep an eye out for some BIG announcements at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference next week. While you’re at it, have a read of this State Services Commission document which does a good job of identifying some of the issues you need to start thinking about when it comes to dealing with 'offshore ICT service providers’ such as cloud computing vendors.

And, finally, this post from Jim Donovan on cloud computing is worth a read too. Coincidentally, he used to be CEO of Fronde.