Page 212 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

to support this activity. It’s not clear how the free FarmVille
users make any money for Facebook, but Facebook seems to
be satisfied with its ability to garner millions of new users.
Facebook may never monetize those 63 million users, but at
least it has the option of trying to do so. Is it possible that seed
and garden suppliers might want to advertise on FarmVille?

Many businesses would like to have this problem, which Face-
book has so effortlessly assimilated.
The cloud is disruptive in other ways as well. While a main-
frame or a large Unix cluster was previously a difficult resource
to access, the cloud makes great bursts of power—say, grab-
bing the services of 12 servers for two hours—relatively cheap.
In the past, credentials as a researcher or a specialized busi-

ness user were needed to access either enterprise or research
center high-performance computing. The cloud makes it
available to any taker who is willing to use a credit card.
A researcher used to spend months or years learning a
computer language and building a program that could execute
against the data that his project possessed. With aids in the
cloud to build programs that will run in the cloud, this process
can be simplified, extended to more people, and speeded up.
A researcher will be able to count on the strength of the plat-

form to provide some of the most complicated parts of the
program, such as linking to a powerful database or moving
data from storage to server memory caches at the right instant.
The researcher won’t have to produce all the code to do this
himself.
Microsoft and IBM are about to supply cloud frameworks
based on their development tools; they will illustrate how the

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