Second, access became ubiquitous with the advent of cell phones, BlackBerrys, iPhones and laptops.
Then access got cheap — almost free. It doesn’t cost you anything to go to Google and look up any information that you want.
“You think about that perfect storm that happened — we’re having an explosion,” Dillon says. “The applications that are being built today are no longer these little things you do inside the building. You don’t write a general ledger for 12 people — you’re doing something that interacts with employees, vendors, suppliers, and what you’re trying to do is provide those people with a wonderful experience.”
McNaught would add another element to that perfect storm — the PC itself. He asks if you really love your PC.
“I don’t mean what you do on your PC, but how many of you love the physical hardware incarnation?” he says. “The keys, the noise, the weight, the dragging it around, and, oh, by the way, if you drop it, it’s probably not useful the next day. It’s part of the business — people don’t want to buy these anymore. The cloud is really the place where you take the things that were on the PC, and you go put it there.”
McNaught says the data indicates that PC market share, which is about 94 percent now, will drop over the next decade to about 10 percent.
“It’s not because less PCs will be sold — maybe a few less, but it will lose its role as the core device we use to access our stuff,” he says. “You’ll see this huge proliferation has already started with tablets and mobile devices and mobile phones and the mobile Internet exploding now. The question becomes, how do I access my stuff? How do I access it securely? And how do I access it at the lowest cost?”
These are questions that most people would agree are incredibly important. In fact, these questions are reasons why cloud hasn’t been successful in the past.
“This had been tried before and it’s failed, because there were two things we couldn’t get right as an industry,” McNaught says. “Early on, we couldn’t make all the software that was important to your business work reliably. We walked into the hospital and the hospital says, ‘We have 400 applications, we can only make 350 work on the cloud. Where are the other 50 we need to execute?’”
The other factor was user experience.
“If you get, from the cloud, an experience that is the slightest bit less robust than the experience you get at home or the office today, what are you going to do?” McNaught says. “You’re going to go beat the living daylights out of the IT guy who suggested the cloud.”
But now, the technologies have changed, and these two pieces have largely been addressed. On top of that, security is stronger than with a PC, and that’s why companies large and small are now using the cloud.
“There’s an adage in the IT industry that when you introduce a technology that reduces costs, you’re giving up benefits, and if you introduce a technology that gives you big benefits, it costs you a fortune,” McNaught says. “The thing about cloud computing is that it fires on both cylinders — it reduces costs dramatically and delivers incremental benefits that you don’t get with the current model.”
With kinks being worked out to create a compelling and viable technology option, how companies do IT is starting to change.
“One of the big drivers of why this is happening and why all these benefits occur is because cloud computing is a lower-cost architecture,” says Brian Jacobs, founder and general partner of Emergence Capital Partners. “You can deliver more computing power to more users for less cost, and that is a compelling driver.”
