Legacy Systems May Be Nearing a Dead End

“We are entering cloud nirvana,” David Dunn, senior vice president of the cloud storage company, Coresite, said at the 8th annual Cloud Computing Expo in New York City held at the Jacob Javits Center.

Invited on stage by Interxion, a Netherlands datacenter firm, Mr. Dunn was referring to the partnership between the companies embracing two cloud continents: American and Euro Clouds. Mr. Dunn and the Dutch speakers explained the importance of the agreement, without addressing the gap and differences between U.S. and European privacy laws. They didn’t have to.

The virtual bridge across the Atlantic enables Interxion’s clients doing business in America to use one of Coresite’s 15 datacenters and vice-versa for Coresite’s customers operating in Europe. Any nuances in privacy laws and cultural differences are being addressed at the local level in each continent.

If Mr. Dunn summed up the four-day conference in just two words, “cloud nirvana,” other speakers talked about the business process, security threats, and data breaches as warfare, and the Era of Virtualization as the new era.

The Changing Paradigm of Business Process

Perhaps the one catchy phrase that stood out came from a slide presentation in the first “Cloud Boot Camp” workshop:

“The work will be the same—it will be different.”

In that session, industry programmers and engineers learned about the significance of change that is going to affect business processes in cloud computing.

As if to drive home that point, Dell’s Steve Shuckenbrock, president of Dell services and former Dell CIO, said in his keynote speech: “The business process has to be mapped out first with the solutions, before IT engineers get involved.”

Mr. Shuckenbrock talked about the “enormous push for efficiency” in an economy that has taken a dive. Efficiencies translate to big savings. For comparison, he mentioned that Mike Dell founded Dell as a computer company 26 years ago at the threshold of the PC revolution, and in the 21st century he said, “We are now seeing a bigger wave of change…” in reference to cloud technology.

In the afternoon track session on “Building a Repeatable Cloud Roadmap,” Dell’s Shirland Whipple and Julian Turner, a former aerospace engineer, echoed a similar sentiment.

It may have surprised most of the conference attendees about how Dell stole the show. Known primarily as a PC company, Dell now sees clearly the impending end of the PC era and has adjusted and adopted the revolution that cloud offers.

Dell has not only gone all-in with setting up datacenters to compete with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, it also ramped up its Cloud Computing drive through acquisitions, such as Dell Boomi six months ago (see follow up interview with Dell Boomi’s CTO Rick Nucci). And as if in a coup, Dell announced that it’s building an R&D Center in Ireland in partnership with the Irish government through the prime minister. The R&D center is expected to open in 18 months.

Third-Party Datacenters vs. On-Premise Legacy Systems

In a dynamic presentation “The Big Win: Stop Playing Small Ball With Your Cloud Strategy,” David Roberts, VP of Strategy at ServiceMesh, a cloud consultant for Global 2000 customers, boldly stated, “Conventional cloud thinking: Cloud is cheaper. Cloud is more agile.”

And for emphasis, his next slide stated: “All of this is Small Ball.”

Mr. Roberts showed in his succeeding slides the rising crests of waves in the 1980’s PC era, the 1990’s Web era where great fortunes were won and lost, and the 2010 Cloud decade. At the top of each of those waves read: “Winners Enforce the Status Quo.”

He followed that up with a lesson slide: “Big Value Capture happens during Rapid Technology Adoption.”

In Mr. Roberts’ view, value capture is comprised of three items—market share, revenue, and profitability. As if to drive home the point, the word “Your” was placed before each of those three value captures.

Mr. Roberts made his boldest statement yet when he said that “middleware” connectivity between computers and the Cloud datacenters will die a Darwinian death. How? With the Cloud, vendors will be able to deploy apps and software codes right onto the provisioning platform without a “middleware.” He used VMware as an example.

Oddly enough, VMware had an exhibitor booth at the conference. Yet VMware managers were directed not to speak with reporters and a follow up by this writer with the company’s Palo Alto media office also did not generate any response.

So is VMware on shaky ground with its model? It’s still too early to tell. Cloud computing is on its way to its crest in this evolution.

Other major legacy leaders like Microsoft and Oracle had a muted presence at the expo. It was as if Microsoft was playing catch up to Dell, and Oracle, represented by somberly clad reps in black khakis and black polo shirts, did not provide any handouts and did little, if any, to reach out to the press and attendees at the show.

Is Oracle stuck in a legacy era, where teams of consultants used go to a corporate customer and design a system requiring lots of customization over a one-year period to be debugged, maintained, and upgraded on an ongoing basis? This approach is loaded with manhours, delays, and budget overruns, and in the final analysis, the system does not work as envisioned or planned.

Yes, databases like Oracle’s will always be needed, whether on-premise or off. If Oracle has a cloud strategy, it wasn’t evident at the expo.

Business Process Will Be the Key Driver

As Dell’s Steve Shuckenbrock told the standing-room audience, “You must define real business results and value. Focus on business outcomes. Define the process. This will help the IT laggards (code the program right).”

He used a plane maintenance industry, as an example. With a plane down with mechanical trouble in Southeast Asia, the cloud enabled the plane company to store the entire maintenance manual online. Then a maintenance worker took a video of the corrosion, they could access the part, download its product data, locate where the part was closest to that airport using a parts management software with GPS, and ship it overnight so the plane could be up and running the next day.

The streamlined process is one example of how cloud computing is already changing the industry, improving efficiency.

Mr. Shuckenbrock referred to the cloud movement as the “speed of innovation.”

With fewer people carrying laptops around compared to last year, and more iPads, tablets, and mobile devices, the Era of Virtualization will be one of the great growth areas of this young, new century.

James Ottar Grundvig is a writer based in New York City.