The Battle for the Cloud

Final round up of the talks from last week’s conference. There was a good one on Google vs Microsoft which looked at the different approaches of these two huge companies in the battle for the cloud computing crown. Google apparently fighting what was termed ‘asymmetric warfare” – they spend a dollar, and force Microsoft to spend 10. They are really pushing the industry and forcing it to change – they have a radical vision which is based totally on cloud computing and uses a technology architecture which they have designed. They are the current leaders in cloud computing, partly because of this infrastructure. Their revenue model is also interesting as about 97.5% of their revenue is from advertising. The remaining 2.5% being attributed to a rounding error!

Microsoft however are basing their strategy on a hybrid model – applications which will run locally or in the cloud. They make most of their revenue from their business division and the windows operating system. But, they are aggressively marketing their latest applications including Bing and Azure.

The Gartner prediction is that for the next 5 years there will be little change - Microsoft will own the office space and Google will own the advertising and search space. After that, there could be major changes.

I also listened to a session on Unified Communications – the growing driver being the multitude of different ways of communicating most of us use, and a desire to be able to move between them easily. We should be looking at this as a way to improve collaboration and personal productivity, and not be driven by cost cutting. Consumerisation is already driving user expectations, and it’s in this market that we’re going to see some innovations, especially in the use of video conferencing.

And finally the closing comments mentioned the back channel discussions that had been taking place during the conference on Twitter using the hashtag. The first time we’ve seen it at a Gartner summit I think – 600 tweets in total with 40 regular tweeters (including me of course), two of my tweets picked out as examples. Mind you, I’m glad I wasn’t the author of the first one to be picked out, which described one of the sessions as a car crash and suggested to the presenter that she kept her day job….