The Three Cs - Cloud, Collaboration, Client

If I were a venture capitalist looking to invest money in the software space, I'd look for innovative new companies that incorporate elements of "three Cs" - Cloud, Collaboration and Client. In my opinion, the three Cs represent the next big wave in the software space. They have the potential to significantly impact the way software is built and deployed, and the way users use software, interact with systems, and with each other. Let's examine the three Cs.

Cloud

Cloud can be defined as a collection of computing resources made publicly available for access through a standard Internet connection and using well-defined APIs. There are three aspects to the cloud - storage, applications and computing.

Cloud Storage - This is the basic and most common use of the cloud - a place to store electronic content. A classic example of cloud storage is online storage of photographs from your camera with sites such as Picasa Web. Another example is regular online backup of the contents of your computer using services such as Apple's iDisk. Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an example of a general purpose cloud storage solution.

Cloud Applications - This is the next level of cloud usage - applications hosted on the cloud that can be used without any software installations on the user's local machine. Saleforce.com is perhaps the poster child for this with their successful hosted CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution. The term SAAS (Software as a Service) is often used to describe such cloud applications. In the last couple of years we have also seen the emergence of application development frameworks such as Google's App Engine which offer a cloud-based platform for building your own applications that are then hosted on the cloud. The term PAAS (Platform as a Service) is often used to describe these offerings.

Cloud Computing - This is the third and perhaps the newest buzz in the cloud space - computing power available for rent in the cloud. You rent virtual machines online for whatever purposes you need, for however long you need, and pay according to usage. The term IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service) is a term that appropriately describes such services. Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is clearly the most prominent player in this space.

So is all the cloud excitement really just hype? Absolutely not. This thing is real and here to stay in a big way. Cloud's value proposition is quite simple and intuitive.

* With Storage, the value proposition is reduced cost, reliability, security, and universal access. I've been using an external hard-drive for backups at home which now roughly costs me the same as using Amazon's S3 (<10GB of data with infrequent transfer in and out of AWS, over a the 5 year lifespan of my drive). With S3, I don't have to worry about my drive failing or getting stolen (my 1TB drive does not have an easy password protection mechanism other than encrypting each file). And of course I cannot access my drive at home from any machine with an Internet connection.

* With Applications, the value proposition is TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), particularly for businesses. Traditional enterprise software has always been a TCO headache for companies that spend a huge amount of their resources installing, maintaining, configuring, upgrading, patching software and the associated hardware. Having someone do that for you cheaper taking advantage of economies of scale makes perfect economic sense. It also makes good business sense because it lets companies focus more on their core business.

* With Computing, the value proposition is cost, flexibility and reliability. Renting computing resources and paying as you go based on usage rather than having to buy, install and maintain hardware and systems software has both cost and reliability implications. I like to use the electric utility grid analogy here - buying electricity from the utility grid works out much cheaper and reliable than every home having its own electric power generator. The additional benefit is the flexibility of being able to scale up or down the computing resources you need as your loads fluctuate. Also, you can pick and choose from a variety of hardware and software configurations at any time. This is a boon for small startups that don't have to buy hardware and can rent just what they need or afford, scaling as they grow. In fact, it is possible to start a purely virtual company which does not own a single server box.

Some critics argue that all the elements of cloud have been around for sometime now and don't understand why there is all this hype suddenly as if a new technology revolution has taken place. While I agree partially with the critics, I think what has happened recently is that the cloud has reached a tipping point. IMO, there are 3 reasons for this tipping point. The first reason is bandwidth. High speed access to the cloud can be taken for granted now for a larger segment of businesses and homes. Unlike a few years ago, today I could probably get high-speed Internet access at a Motel 6 in rural Kansas. The second reason is virtualization technologies that have matured to make cost effective virtual machines on commodity hardware possible. The third and maybe the most important one is that the "big boys" are entering this space in a big way - Google with App Engine and Apps, Amazon with EC2, S3, SDB and SQS, Microsoft with Azure and OfficeLive, and IBM with its massive cloud initiative. These technology leaders are bound to drive innovation and adoption on a massive scale.

So everything about the cloud seems very rosy. Surely there must be some challenges. Of course, there are several.

* Security and Privacy - Security of content in the cloud is a concern for everyone especially for enterprise customers who may hold sensitive customer and business data. Ensuring that the data in the cloud can be accessed only by those authorized is absolutely critical. Also recent compliance requirements such as SOX force more processes around securing data for companies. While security concerns are genuine, there are good solutions. Today companies are storing their critical business data on the cloud e.g. the hundreds of companies that entrust their CRM data to Salesforce.com to be stored along-side data from their competitors (possibly in the same database instance!). Privacy concerns are important for individual consumers who want guarantees that their personal information will not be abused in any way. Ultimately it all comes down to trust, and as the cloud becomes more mainstream, it is likely companies and individuals will become more and more comfortable with most (if not all) of their data on the cloud.

* Vendor Lock-In - This is a major issue that is perhaps the biggest challenge to cloud adoption. With SAAS and PAAS, you are locked into a particular cloud vendor. What if you decide a year later to go elsewhere? There may not be an easy way to migrate to another cloud services provider. At a recent SDForum Cloud Services SIG talk, the term "cloud-neutrality" was mentioned several times. Until standards emerge and get adopted widely by cloud services providers, lock-in is going to a reality.

* Cloud Interoperability - This is going to be an issue for enterprise customers who move to using business applications on the cloud. Consider a company that uses Salesforce.com. Say the company acquires two companies - one using Workday and another using Netsuite. How does the company go about consolidating these three into one? Even a simple single sign-on across all three will be a major challenge leave alone data or business process integration. Web Services standards help to some extent assuming what you need is exposed as Web Services by the SAAS/PAAS vendor, but it does not solve the problem of rationalizing data semantics e.g. how do you rationalize the definition of Customer in one system with that in another? While this problem has always existed even with non-cloud applications from different vendors, with the cloud, the problem is compounded because the cloud applications are complete black-boxes to you and you have no access to the underlying data stores and app infrastructure which are hidden behind the SAAS/PAAS provider's proprietary systems. This has the potential to be a huge problem and perhaps a great opportunity for new companies providing "inter-cloud " migration/integration tools and services.

Collaboration

Once content is in the cloud, it is logical to think of how users can collaborate with each other on that content with the content remaining in the cloud. The last part is key - content that is collaborated on remains in the cloud and is not downloaded to the user's machine. So we are not talking of (say) one user editing a PowerPoint presentation, posting or e-mailing it, and another user pulling it down, making changes and posting or e-mailing another version. We are talking of real-time, concurrent editing of cloud content collaboratively by multiple users. Using PowerPoint as an example, new companies such as SlideRocket (now part of Adobe) and InstaColl offer such collaborative presentation software alternatives to Microsoft PowerPoint. Google offers simple word processing and spreadsheet solutions with Google Docs. Microsoft of course also offers such a service with OfficeLive but it still requires traditional Office applications installed on your machine and is therefore more of a cloud storage solution and less of a collaboration solution as described above.

For those who have struggled with managing and sharing versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, I'm sure the notion of cloud-based collaboration without ever having to work with local versions of files is appealing. However, it remains to be seen if commercial-grade products can deliver a rigorous solution that handles the complexity of managing real-time concurrent updates, merge conflict resolutions, branching and versioning. This is strikingly similar to what revision control systems such as Clearcase and SVN do for source code; and we know the complexities involved with a large group of geographically dispersed developers working on a shared code base. But it is a surmountable problem and some winners are likely to emerge given the huge potential for products and solutions that improve the widely-used office productivity software.

Real-time collaboration with screen sharing, instant messaging, audio and video streams are powerful and familiar tools in collaboration which become even more powerful with the cloud because of cloud content being accessible from anywhere. You could, for example, launch a conference from any machine (or device) and collaborate on content residing in the cloud.

While screen sharing based collaboration is powerful, there is another even more powerful, emerging collaboration technique that I call "gesture replay". Unlike in screen sharing where collaboration is achieved by scraping the pixels off a presenter's screen and sending it across to other participants in the collaboration session, in gesture replay, the presenter's user gesture alone is sent across to all participants. The user gesture is then replayed at each participant's client resulting in the same state transition in each participant's application as the presenter's. Of course each participant has to be running the same client software and the collaboration is limited to only that client software and not the entire desktop. For example, all users connected to a Web site loading a Flash-based application can collaborate inside that application using gesture replay. With gesture replay, the user gesture event being propagated to all participants is very compact and bandwidth efficient because it only involves information about the event and not the application state resulting from execution of the event. This results in very efficient, fast, real-time responses for all participants. With gesture replay, you can get the responsiveness of a native instant messaging application in a screen sharing-type collaboration.

As noted above, gesture replay involves replaying the presenter's gesture in each participant's client. This obviously implies that the logic and knowledge to replay the gesture resides in each client which in turn implies that such clients are powerful applications and not simple Web pages. Further, it also implies that the clients run within powerful runtimes that can efficiently execute events in real-time. This brings us to the third "C" of the three Cs - Client.

But before we move on to the Client, it is worth noting that real-time collaboration with gesture replay has some scalability challenges with HTTP. Proprietary solutions exist today to solve the scalability problem. The upcoming Servlet 3.0 spec (JSR 315) with its suspend-able/resume-able request support will offer a standards-based solution which is likely to promote wider adoption of such collaboration techniques.

Client

I started programming on IBM mainframes using punch cards as input (man, was that painful!). There was no client. Then came dumb terminals. We gradually moved to minicomputers, workstations and PCs. The client-server era gave birth to widespread adoption of business software which had graphical user interfaces and were client-heavy. With the Internet revolution and the Web, the focus shifted back to the server with clients being thin Browser-based. The Web has of course truly revolutionized our lives. However, as we have striven to do more and more with the Browser which was oriented towards rendering static pages, we have struggled to provide users with engaging, rich, high-performance clients. Web 2.0 has moved us a step above where we used to be in this regard, but we are not there yet. We need the Web 2.5 revolution to get us to where we provide more intuitive, interactive, graphical, responsive interfaces to users.

With Web 2.5, the focus shifts back to the client while at the same time being able to maintain a Browser model - the best of both worlds. RIA (Rich Internet Application) technolgies such as Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX are ushering in the Web 2.5 (r)evolution. As this post describes, these RIA technologies provide very efficient and powerful client runtimes (such as the Flash Player), a uniform and consistent target to program to (without having to code for each Browser), and formalized client-side component and event model frameworks to build complex applications containing heavy-duty client-side logic. Such RIAs take advantage of the powerful machines users run their clients on, which traditional DHTM/AJAX applications have not done. A customer once asked us why his iPhone which is at best a 600MHz processor with 128MB RAM can provide such a cool interface for applications while our DHTML enterprise application running on a dual-core 2GHz box with 2GB RAM was so crummy!

The Web 2.5 (r)evolution is well underway. We are beginning to see more and more enterprise scale applications such as those from Workday that take advantage of the Web 2.5 model.

From a collaboration perspective, the Web 2.5 client model facilitates the kind of gesture replay collaboration described earlier. This is due to
a) the emergence of frameworks and tools from companies such as Adobe (for Flash/Flex), Micosoft (for Silverlight, WPF) and SUN (for JavaFX) which allow for users building heavy-duty applications that can handle the gesture event execution logic, and
b) efficient runtimes such as the ActionScript VM (Virtual Machine) for Flash or the Java VM for JavaFX - runtimes featuring JIT compilers, that allow for high performance gesture event execution on the client.


So there it is - the three Cs - Cloud, Collaboration and Client. As developers, we need to start orienting our skill sets towards these exciting new trends.