Page 41 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

THE C L O UD REV O L UTION

To Sheth-Voss, the cloud supplied deliverance from a com-
plicated dilemma and allowed him to meet an important
deadline for a direct expense that could be covered by many
businesses’ petty cash funds. Such an outcome would have
been unlikely to occur in the past because he would not
have been given “programmatic control” of someone else’s

powerful servers. Hitherto expensive processing, such as analy-
sis of customer buying patterns or how thousands of visitors
move around your company’s Web site, is suddenly within
reach of many who had no means of adding equivalent pro-
cessing power to their own data center.
If a fast and cheap alternative to Oracle can be found in
the cloud, then there may be a method behind Mr. Ellison’s

putdowns of cloud computing. His company, after all, is heav-
ily invested in the last generation of computing, packaged
applications that run in each company’s data center. Cloud
computing does nothing to further that strategy; in fact, the
cloud is a major threat to his business.
As in the example given here, if one researcher with
limited computer skills can make use of the cloud, so can
many others. In this sense, the cloud is a force that completes
something that the PC Revolution started 27 years ago. Com-

puting’s end user is now in charge of the resource and will
formulate big plans for what to do with it. The master/
slave relationship between the PC and the server has been
banished. Computing’s citizens—or perhaps we should say
Netizens—are about to be invested with power over a new do-
main. The Cloud Revolution is a time of vibrant innovation
and upheaval.

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