Chris Weitz from Deloitte Consulting visited Haas to share his thoughts on trends in Cloud Computing with members of the Haas Tech Club on the evening of October 20.
Some of his fascinating insights included
- The real power of Cloud Computing is that the information or processes simultaneously are everywhere and nowhere, making them very hard to kill (think Skynet).
o Data and tasks are sliced into very small pieces and “striped” multiple times across many computers, therefore any one device’s failure does not impact the performance of the system.
o The system is “horizontally scalable,” meaning that adding additional nodes won’t diminish performance as the architecture automatically rebalances the “striping” across the added equipment.
- Several companies have gotten an early lead on dominating the Vendor Cloud space (i.e., Amazon Web Services and Google) with several others currently making big investments to catch-up (e.g., Microsoft and IBM).
o Benefits for customers include the ability to only incur the expense of the time they use the cloud and not make large capital expenditures for equipment that will go unused ~90% of the time.
o Technology firms that provide or use cloud architectures show remarkably higher net income growth than those who have lagged behind.
- While the rate of adoption is still up for debate, the genie is out of the bottle on Cloud Computing and it’s here to stay.
But, Chris’s presentation wasn’t just a collection of technical trends, market research or facts and figures. Instead, Chris married amusing anecdotes about Fortune 500 CIOs with his passion for the topic to create a captivating and interactive discussion with the HTC members lucky enough to attend.