A Bridge To The Cloud
Wolfgang Tonninger, 19/02/2010, posted in "Analysis"
Not a UC4 employee, but an external source and UC4 companion. Wolfgang Tonninger is responsible for irritation and inspiration in this blog, and secretly the blog engine. He has ...more info
Not a UC4 employee, but an external source and UC4 companion. Wolfgang Tonninger is responsible for irritation and inspiration in this blog, and secretly the blog engine. He has been working in content creation and development for 20 years, as well as writing about intelligent use of IT solutions. He thinks too much about cultural aspects of technology - sometimes offline without bad conscience. ...less info
People like to think in “either-or”solutions, trying to make their lives easier, and maybe unconsciously trusting the paradox that more choices may lead to a poorer decision (Paradox of Choice). This is in spite of a reality which often proves to follow a more fuzzy and compromising “both-and” logic.
Take the hype about cloud computing. Although the world is full of cloud apologists nowadays one should bear in mind that the cloud market is still nascent – with, so far, only 4 percent of small and enterprise companies from the United States and Europe taking advantage of it, which means, from a management point of view, that in the nearer future we will have to deal with the reality of hybrid environments and even more processes connecting physical, virtual and/or cloud-based platforms.
Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business, proves that serious cloud providers like Microsoft share this view: “There’s more than one flavor of cloud computing, including private clouds that run on a business’s on-site servers. And it needn’t be an all-or-nothing proposition; we expect customers to want to integrate on-premises datacenters with an external cloud”.
This reality one needs to have in mind when it comes to evaluate the new “Agent for Web Services” UC4 unveiled some weeks ago. In a conversation I had with Vincent Stueger, Chief Technology Officer, UC4 Software last week, he told me why this Agent is “a really big and promising step. Because it’s much more than offering a simple web interface to remotely start a job or change a parameter. With this agent you can seamlessly monitor and control a process from the ground to the cloud and back.”
If Milind Govekar, Research Vice President, Gartner, is to be believed, this bridging capability will not just decide on the future of automation, but also on the future of the cloud: “The ability of the technology platform to manage a hybrid environment consisting of legacy and cloud applications with a single automation platform will be needed for clearing the way for greater adoption of cloud-based models.”
The cloud is not our destiny, but it brings a big choice – if we are able to provide the bridges.
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