Last week I attended the Cloud³ conference by Xconomy Boston. It was a great opportunity to listen to various perspectives on cloud computing, including SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

Listened to Akamai, EMC, Microsoft (Azure), Iron Mountain, and a few other New England area startups. The most interesting part, for me, was the freeform discussion between a panel and the audience.

To summarize, here were my key takeaways

• Virtualization of computing resources: applications, platforms, middleware, and hardware - will be a juggernaut IT theme for 2010.
• SaaS and IaaS has wide applicability for IT in general.
• Major concerns are, in order: Security of data, availability, performance, compliance. All of those concerns, however, exist no matter where resources are hosted.
• Why trust Amazon to secure your app? Because they are better at it than you
• Why trust SaaS and PaaS offerings to offer high availability, scalability, and security: because deep understanding of the domain and focus on operations makes those vendors the best in the world at hosting their solution.
• The concept of SaaS is well established and no longer a point of debate. I was surprised that there was not more discussion about the economics of SaaS, particularly CMRR and CAC.
• Some discussion around CAPEX for startups - entrepreneurs want low up-front expense and rapid time to market - PaaS brings both of those.
• Concern around vendor lock-in, how to get data out of a system - "Data has gravity".
• Consensus that PaaS is all about APIs and application execution environment, not virtualized hardware.
• Some discussion about whether a startup's choice of cloud vendor could affect their M&A. (would Google want you if you were on MS Azure?).
• Compliance: Microsoft says, "lets just make the agencies that legislate compliance lean about cloud and change their policy".
• The real savings when you move to cloud is on staff.

Also very interesting was the use of Twitter as a "dark channel" during the presentations. The attendee Tweets were sometimes more interesting than the speakers! Check them out here.

The ZeitGeist is that cloud computing is the beginning of a fundamental shift in approaching computing resources, and while it may be true that some aspects are not wholly new (SaaS is a lot like the ASPs of the late 90's), the collective mass of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS changes the economics of applications, what applications are, and how collaborating business partners and consumers take advantage of each other's services.

Exciting times.

The current makeup of data sources for the digital universe is primarily created by humans. IDC estimates that in 2008, individuals created ~70% of the information in the digital universe, comprising phone calls, emails, photos, online banking transactions, and postings on social networking sites, including Twitter.

What happens when everything connects?

In 2005, the International Telecommunication Union issued a research report called "The Internet of Things." The article addresses the next step in "always-on" communications, in which new technologies like smart computing promise a world of networked and interconnected devices. As a result, a new era will be created, one in which today's Internet gives way to tomorrow's Internet of Things.

IDC forecasts that the size of the digital universe will double in size every 18 months for the next five years. The primary driver behind this explosion in the digital universe is -- you guessed it -- The Internet of Things!

 

According to IDC:

"The growth of the numbers and types of devices that aren't the traditional enterprise PCs, servers, storage systems, and network equipment, will drive changes in network and data center architecture and management. Where today, most corporate computing traffic on networks is from the server to client, more and more devices reporting in from the network edge will be reversing that trend. They will also be sending in much more diverse signal voice packets, minutes of video surveillance, and sensor signals that need to be dealt with immediately. All, of course, need security, management, and storage, at least for a period of time."

The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe, IDC 2009

Birth of the M2M platform market

We are living on the bleeding edge of a new generation of the digital universe that will consist mainly of data passed from machine-to-machine. What has emerged from this explosive growth is the demand for ways to manage, store, and secure this new type of information -- enter the M2M platform.

What makes a true M2M platform different from a standard middleware platform is its ability to handle all types of non-standard and specialized information from any device and any connection. The value of the platform also comes from the ability to transform complex data into an object model that can then have processing, rules, and security applied to it. For small amounts of data, this may seem like a possible do-it-yourself task, but looking at the overall scale may make you consider outside assistance. Axeda has been doing this for years now and we'd like the opportunity to talk to you about how you can capitalize on the Internet of Things Economy.

For more information on the essential elements of an M2M platform, see our:

• Axeda SmartLink Platform White Paper 
• Axeda SmartLink Platform Overview Video

Michele Pelino at Forrester Research recently wrote a blog article on the rise of M2M opportunities, entitled "Vendors: Prepare For The Rise Of Machine To Machine (M2M) Opportunities". Roughly eight years ago, Forrester introduced the concept of the X Internet, made up of Smart sensors, Smart objects connected to Smart services. They had it right, but it just took a while!

Back in 2001, the economics were not right. Wireless data communication was very expensive. And the technology was in its infancy -- we had just introduced the 1.0 version of our product.

Now, with the emergence of platforms for building M2M applications, such as the Axeda SmartLink Platform, Forrester's vision eight years ago is now becoming a reality.

Harbor Research recently wrote an article (PDF) about the need and progress toward a unified pervasive platform for real-time device and human interaction via the Internet. They cite a number of requirements needed for such a platform:

1. Communications agnostic
2. Open and interoperable
3. Scalable
4. Hosted in the cloud
   

The Axeda SmartLink Platform meets these requirements today. The article also mentions the need for plug-and-play integration with devices. We are working on that with our hardware partners, and have the Axeda Wireless Protocol available to simplify device connectivity.

Connecting all the intelligent devices in the the world still remains a challenge, but we are getting there one step at a time.