Internet-based 'cloud computing' grows among businesses
Working with technicians Stan Guirreri and Deshawn Ringgold, founder and chief executive of Mithril Technology, Jason Aptekar, explains details of the company's cloud-computing service. (September, 2010) Credit: Michael E. Ach
"Cloud computing" - a buzz phrase among businesses these days - is revolutionizing the way companies use technology, some computer experts say.
Cloud computing, simply put, allows companies to buy software and hardware as services over the Internet, which is often depicted as a cloud. The technology lets users access their information from any computer with an Internet connection.
It's become such a hot area that CA Technologies Inc. in Islandia has acquired five cloud-computing companies since June 2009, and has announced plans to purchase another.
Hewlett-Packard emerged as the winner earlier this month of a fierce bidding war with Dell to buy the cloud computing company 3Par for $2.4 billion. The bidding began with a Dell offer of $1.15 billion.
Along with the technology has come a new business model. Companies can receive services instantly instead of waiting for a vendor to install them. And when projects require extra computing power, companies can obtain it and return the resources when they are finished, paying only for what they use.
"That was never possible before," said Dennis Dissick, senior account executive for HP on Long Island. "You always had to go out and buy this stuff or rent it. And what happens next? Nobody is going to take it back."
CA Chief Executive Bill McCracken, in a speech in May at the CA World gathering in Las Vegas, likened cloud computing to a long electronic supply chain at companies' disposal.
"Running IT [information technology] in a cloud-connected enterprise will be more like running a supply chain, where organizations can tap into the IT services as needed, specifying when, where and precisely how they are delivered," he said.
It isn't known how many businesses use cloud computing applications, but 69 percent of consumers regularly use a cloud-based application such as Google Docs, Gmail or Hotmail to file backups, according to the Pew Research Center.
Cloud innovations have enabled companies to expand their computer operations instantly.
"If you need to double your capacity, that is no big deal," said Bob Juckiewicz, vice president of IT at Hofstra University in Hempstead.
When the school hosted a presidential debate in 2008, its Web server wasn't in the cloud. Juckiewicz wished it had been.
"During the presidential debate, we were in the Top 10 Googled sites," he said. "That meant that we needed to have a lot of capacity to serve that kind of information up."
So the tech staff, Juckiewicz said, had to "beg, borrow and steal from other places and temporarily move some stuff around." Response time was still slow, he added, but in a cloud "they can be elastic because they are providing so many services."
The university does use some cloud services, including Google's for student e-mail accounts, a service that is cheaper to run in a cloud.
Why is cloud computing gaining prominence now? Forrester Research, a Massachusetts technology-research company, said a chief reason is investments by Amazon, Google and Microsoft in data centers to support their businesses and to provide computing services to businesses.
"You don't have to host infrastructure or generate your own power," said Jason Aptekar, the head of Mithril Technology in Westbury. "Little guys have better access to sophisticated programming without having to invest in a lot of hardware."
