Everywhere I look, I see Clouds

No, not a comment on the weather in East Yorkshire this 'summer,' but rather a reflection on the recent eruption of content related to Cloud computing. Having taken a long weekend away from the computer, punctuated by occasional iPhone-powered checking of my feeds to sate the addiction, it really did feel as if there was a new Cloud computing post near the top of the pile every time I looked.

First up was a great piece from fellow ZDNet blogger, Dion Hinchcliffe. In 'Enterprise cloud computing gathers steam', Dion writes about the Cloud's ability to lower IT costs within the enterprise and accelerate technological innovation at the same time.

"Interestingly, it’s at this very intersection of issues that cloud computing appears especially compelling. By offering easy access to more efficient IT capabilities across computing, storage, and applications while providing direct and immediate access to both external innovation and innovation capability, cloud computing offers an on-demand, scalable, and repeatable resource that can be used the solve two of the major challenges facing IT departments today. We’ll see in a moment how cloud computing can help with these issues in ways that traditional on-premises computing is hard pressed to match."

Dion's piece was followed (at least in my reading, if not necessarily chronologically) by a guest post on TechCrunchIT by Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff. In 'Welcome to Web 3.0: Now Your Other Computer is a Data Center', Mark paints a compelling picture of the shift back to shared compute resources;

"For almost ten years now, we have been witnessing a decisive shift from client-server software to software as a service. Google, eBay, and Amazon.com established the value of multi-tenant internet applications in the consumer market, and salesforce.com, Google, and others have been proving that this same multi-tenant model is winning in the enterprise as well."

Interestingly, especially in the context of this blog, Mark makes use of the 'Web 3.0' moniker... but in a very different way;

"This shift to Web-based applications has generated two powerful waves so far. Now, we are seeing a third wave—one that we are calling Web 3.0—and it may prove to be the most significant and disruptive yet to the traditional software industry.

While the world doesn’t need another buzzword, I feel that both the emerging generation of entrepreneurs and developers, as well as traditional software ISVs, need to grasp the enormity of Web 3.0 and its potential to create change, disruption, and opportunity. Web 3.0 is about replacing existing software platforms with a new generation of platforms as a service."

He suggests that Web 1.0 was, fundamentally, a 'transactional' web; Web 2.0 a 'participatory' web; Web 3.0 a web in which anyone can innovate by calling upon shared resources in the Cloud.

"Web 3.0 changes all of this by completely disrupting the technology and economics of the traditional software industry. The new rallying cry of Web 3.0 is that anyone can innovate, anywhere. Code is written, collaborated on, debugged, tested, deployed, and run in the cloud. When innovation is untethered from the time and capital constraints of infrastructure, it can truly flourish."

The transitions that Dion and Mark identify and describe are significant shifts in the IT industry. These shifts are as significant to the increasingly mainstream capabilities of the Semantic Web as elsewhere, although neither Dion nor Mark directly make that leap in their posts.

Discussing these posts internally, a colleague was quick to remind us that these huge hosted data centres are not just full of powerful servers. They're full of data, ripe for interconnection and manipulation in very similar ways to those in which computers and software applications are already being meshed and combined. The Linked Data movement is increasingly central to the Semantic Web and it is a small step to move beyond its current projects to consider web-based applications that draw seamlessly upon these web-addressable pools of accessible and usable data.

Google did web developers, application users (and themselves) a huge favour when they formalised the apis that provided access to large bodies of map data. Mashups exploded, and everyone sat up and took notice of the opportunities for innovation boot-strapped upon the shared capabilities of Google's code and servers, and the underlying data licensed by Google.

As more and more data - and compute capability - moves to the Cloud, and as the licensing frameworks formalise in order to explicitly ensure a wide range of re-use for those data, we're moving ever closer to a mode in which software is available on demand (SaaS)... and so is data (and no, I'm not going to call it DaaS!)

This wealth of Web-addressable data needs web-native structures in which it can be stored and manipulated. The siloised mentality, code and structures of the RDBMS are unlikely to fit the bill here, whereas the web-native model of the Semantic Web is ready and waiting.

And yesterday evening, as I pretended to watch Dragons' Den, a flurry of Cloud-related posts appeared in my BusinessWeek feeds to join the piece by Stacey Higginbotham that I wrote about last week.

Everywhere I look, I see Clouds. But the Dragons haven't noticed yet.

And here in East Yorkshire? The sun might actually be coming out.