A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

COFES 2012 and Cloud Discussion: Why? Why Not? How?

COFES 2012 and Cloud Discussion: Why? Why Not? How?
Oleg
Oleg
16 April, 2012 | 3 min for reading

One of the topics of second COFES 2012 Congress was about the cloud. I want to refer to one of the most interesting quotes related cloud / internet from Alan Kay keynote at COFES 2012: Since its inception (1969) the internet was never shut down/rebooted! Which other system can boast such performance? Alan Kay at #COFES2012

The discussion during the second-day Congress was moderated by Brad Holtz and Monica Schnitger. In my view, it was one of the most interesting discussions during COFES 2012.

Below, I put few tweet messages from #COFES2012 twitter stream that can give you some reflection on what was going on.

Cloud: Why? Why Not? How?

I think cloud discussions matured over the past 12-24 months. I can clearly see it in the reaction of companies and vendors. 3-4 years ago, cloud was a promise. Few vendors demonstrated successful solutions using cloud software. Among them Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and few others. The difference cloud made over the past years turned cloud into a platform. This is an important difference we need to mention. When I first started to blog about cloud solutions in PLM, the most frequent question people asked was “why”? With more and more examples of mainstream cloud deployments, it changed into “Why not”? It became obvious when few cloud services such as dropbox and some others became a mainstream. So, the question I can hear now is mostly “How?” to make cloud work in a most efficient way for a specific customer or user situation.

What is my conclusion? Cloud is a new platform. This is the best conclusion for cloud discussion at COFES 2012. Vendors will have to figure out how to make their solution leveraging this new platform and provide value for customers. Cloud platform will require us to rethink many existing concepts. It will relate to quality, speed, price, openness and many others. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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