The idea of the cloud is essentially that you plug into the wall, and you get a whole data center.
“It’s IT as a service, just as you get electricity or water,” Dillon says. “In business, you, in most cases, don’t have your own power plant, you didn’t dig your own well, you didn’t build your own building, you don’t have your own fire department or police department. So why on Earth do we basically give power to a group to build something that has been built before in-house, and then hope it works?”
Dillon also points out that in the United States, capital expenditures are a huge expense. In fact, about 50 percent of capital expenditures in America are information technology.
“Unbelievable,” Dillon says. “How many people are getting the ROI on this? What’s happening with the cloud is some big companies are saying, ‘Look, I’ll build the data center.’ It’s changing who buys, why it’s bought, and it changes the capacity and the economic decision-making process around IT.”
When you look at how much money most organizations spend on their IT systems, these cost savings are a big driver and will, ultimately, be a game changer for business.
“Amazon, who is a leader in cloud technology, told me that they think it’s a $1 trillion a year potential business,” Dillon says. “So if there’s a trillion dollars at stake, that means every company within 50 miles of here is going to make a really big bet, and it’s so disruptive, because the buyers are going to change, and the sellers are going to change.”
The other benefit, aside from cost, is that you now have everything that is on your PC in one location that can be accessed from anywhere — not just from the PC itself.
“When you take your software and your applications and your data and you move it to the cloud, something’s happened,” McNaught says. “First off, the cloud is the data center of your company and you can always get to it. You’re connected to the Internet, so you can get there from home, from the conference center, from the airport. And guess what? Because it’s not on a PC with a hard drive failing and memory getting filled up, it’s protected. It’s backed up. It’s secure. So the cloud provides this real opportunity to take the things that make up our work life and, within five years, our home life as well, and move them to this one place where we can always find our stuff.”
The evolution of cloud
Dillon is amazed by cloud computing, and if you look at how it’s evolved and how it’s changing business, it’s hard to disagree with him.
“This cloud thing is the biggest thing that’s happened in technology since the IBM computer, and that’s pretty big, and at least as big as the Internet in terms of economic disruption, because it changes how and where we do our computing,” Dillon says.
He says to go back a few years and remember how every small and midsized business had a room with computers in it and maybe a server or two.
“As businesspeople, you probably didn’t understand what they were for, but you knew they were important and you wrote checks,” he says. “It was hard to be good at that, because you had a business to run, and presumably you were an expert at that business, and you used technology to be good at that business or best at that business, so it was a necessary evil.”
Over the last 10 to 15 years, a variety of things happened that became game changers. First, we got the Internet.
“Everybody is connected — not just a few people are connected — and we’re connected not just inside our companies but outside our companies,” Dillon says.
