Scott Kveton

I’m excited to be Chairing Innotech 2009 here in Portland, OR. With the event only a week away, I thought I would do a few blog posts about speakers and interesting events and tracks for people that will be attending. You’ve registered, right?!

First up, I’d I thought I would share a Q & A we recently did with Peter Coffee of Salesforce.com. Peter is the Director of Platform Research at Salesforce and he’s going to be speaking next week on cloud computing with his talk entitled Code for the Cloud.

Let’s get to it:

Q:: Almost everyone has heard of “cloud” computing. Yet, few of us truly understand it. What is the impact of cloud computing on the average user?

A:: If you look at where the real excitement has been in personal computing during the past several years, it has not been on the desktop or the laptop: it’s been in the cloud, with tools like Google Calendar and Facebook and Flickr and with access devices like the iPhone and other Web-capable handhelds. The fastest-growing segments of the end-user hardware market are those that come closest to being no hardware at all: the handhelds and the netbook-class PCs, whose primary function is convenient connection to the cloud. That’s where people are finding the most compelling end-user experience available, today and even more so in the future.

Individual users, small and medium business users, and even the largest enterprises are discovering the massive economies and the far more rapid pace of innovation and adoption that the cloud computing model can provide. That applies to both the best practices embodied in packaged (and customizable) applications, like Salesforce CRM, or the open-ended development opportunities of cloud platforms like Force.com. Personal communities, customer and partner ecosystems, and modern business processes are all being built, and expanded and refined, at Internet speed.

Q:: Do you see interest in the cloud exploding internationally now as well? Which countries have really picked it up?

A:: In the past year, I’ve made multiple visits to Europe, Central/South America, India and the Pacific Rim. In all of those places, I find enormous interest among business stakeholders in modernizing their systems and building their customer and partner ecosystems without capital investment and without high-risk, long-delay software development.

Countries like India, with enormous growth in their mid-market sector and without large legacy investments in older technologies, are growing their use of cloud resources at twice the pace of the rest of the world. For software entrepreneurs in these countries, the cloud represents far more rapid entry at far lower cost to a global market of customers in every sector of business and industry. Brazil and China are other notable centers of cloud adoption, but the cloud is the focus of new IT projects in every market that I visit.

No one, in any part of the world, is planning major new initiatives based on the on-premise model. The cost and complexity burdens of that aging model are clear, and are still growing, while any remaining concerns about the cloud are rapidly being addressed by enterprise service providers like salesforce.com.

Q:: If I were shopping for a new computer system, how should I evaluate the storage merits of a hard drive if I’m wanting to embrace this new concept of cloud computing?

A:: The old model of PC purchasing treated the hard drive as part of the PC system. As you get more accustomed to having anywhere/anytime access to all of your information assets, you’ll start thinking of your personally owned storage devices as just one part of the pool of storage that’s available to you.

You’ll start thinking of the hard drive on a PC or laptop as mainly the boot-up device and the local cache for things you want to use on that 14-hour trans-Pacific flight, at least until next year when in-flight Internet starts becoming common on every route. Going forward, personal storage purchasers should start to think about network-connected storage units, with their own preferred level of security measures such as full-disk encryption, that they can attach to their home network hub and use — or share, selectively — throughout the cloud, wherever the Net can reach.

Q:: I am sure you get a lot of concerns from customers about the security of data in their cloud. What is the salesforce.com attitude on security?

A:: Almost every real-world incident of data theft, breach, or loss turns out to involve someone who was authorized to have access to that data — and who misused that access, either by ignorance or carelessness or with deliberate intent. That risk has nothing to do with where data is stored, but it has everything to do with who has access privileges and how people actually interact with information resources.

An enterprise cloud environment gives the owner of an IT asset far more visibility into who’s using what information, when, from where, and can enable far more precise control of who’s allowed to use which resources in which ways. The cloud model reduces the tendency for desktops, laptops, USB keys and other user-managed devices to wind up holding data that’s not being used, but is all too easily lost.

A simple flush of the browser cache can eliminate any residual data from a cloud-computing session: if a laptop gets lost or stolen, it’s annoying, but it’s no longer catastrophic. If a user’s machine crashes, logging in from any other machine gets the user back to work right away, without losing even a minute’s worth of current work or task history. Meanwhile, data that’s stored in an enterprise-grade cloud facility gets the affordable protections of world-class physical security, robust facility construction, and professional system management at levels that few companies can cost-effectively provide for themselves.

Q:: What kind of technology and development applications does cloud computing bring to the developer community?

A:: During the past two years, there’s been a massive shift in developer interest from the desktop to the cloud. Developer surveys for almost the past two decades found developers mainly focused on a single dominant desktop computing platform, but lately that platform has dramatically slowed its pace of creating new developer opportunities — while the Web application market has been surging at a tremendous rate. Current surveys find developers mainly interested in understanding the skills required to combine a rich user experience with the convenience and the collaborative power of the cloud.

Fortunately, the same low cost and immediate access of the cloud that developers want to provide to application users are also empowering the developers themselves. Free tools, free documentation, and free access to a community of skilled professionals are no longer exclusive to the world of open-source software: they’re also part of the core value proposition for cloud-based development on Force.com. We offer developers free Eclipse-based tooling, and a free Developer Account environment (with sign-up at http://developer.force.com) for learning, building, and even showing an application to prospective customers: there’s no money charged until the developer has real customers who want to log in and get to work.