By James Bourne

With the analysts predicting cloud computing to rise and rise in 2013, it can be refreshing to get a consumer perspective on how they use the cloud and their overall knowledge of it.

Yet the signs don’t appear to be good – a new survey from UK-based hosting group Webfusion has revealed that two thirds of UK consumers don’t have a clear view of what the cloud entails.

Webfusion polled over 1,000 people, with their findings giving little credence to a consumer shift in cloud perception.

When asked the question ‘when it comes to computers, do you understand what ‘cloud’ means?’, just over a third (33.8%) related most closely to the response ‘yes, I have a clear understanding’. 28.5% emphatically said ‘no!’ whilst 18.3% agreed with the response ‘I have some understanding’.

Not particularly good signs there and the response was similar when concerning understanding of cloud products.

Roughly one in three saw the likes of Dropbox (31.7%), iTunes (30.6%) and Gmail/Hotmail (28.7%) as cloud services, with a similar number (29.3%) believing that none of them were cloudy.

Consumer perception of the cloud is at a similar level in the US, if a survey from virtualisation expert Citrix last year is anything to go by.

Particularly eye-opening results included 40% saying an advantage of the cloud was accessing work information in their “birthday suit”, and 25% saying the cloud was great for keeping embarrassing videos off the hard drive.

It wasn’t all bad news in the Citrix survey however, as some practical uses were cited; lowering costs, catalysing SME growth and improving consumer engagement for businesses being the top three.

So why is consumer opinion so flaky? It could all be down to semantics – something which needs to be clarified and improved upon in 2013.

One of Forrester’s big cloud computing predictions for this year was that companies will stop saying that everything is going cloud.

According to Thomas Vollrath, CEO of Host Europe, the parent company of Webfusion, it’s easier for everyone concerned to be more specific about the terms a company offers.

“The research shows that providers of online services to the consumer market should be very wary of using the word ‘cloud’,” said Vollrath, adding: “Most users don’t understand the technicalities of what defines a cloud service, and probably care even less.”

Vollrath continued: “Cloud remains strictly a business term, but even then I would argue that it is just as important – perhaps more so – to focus on the specific benefits of the service that you provide.

“Telling a business owner of MD that you can significantly lower their hosting costs and improve availability is usually a much more compelling message than simply to rely on the cachet of cloud.”

What can be done to make the consumer more knowledgeable on the cloud?

http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2013/jan/11/consumer-knowledge-cloud-still-vague-says-new-survey/

By Mark Atterby – Senior Staff Writer

As well the benefits of cost, scalability and flexibility, Cloud computing is giving organisations the ability to acquire IT automation to apply to a specific task or function without implementing a complex and costly system upgrade (regardless if it’s hosted or on-premise) nor necessarily engage in an extensive outsourcing project

Terms such as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and BPaaS (Business Process as a Service) have emerged as the cloud evolution rolled over the business world and changed the way IT resources are managed. Phil Gamble, from Expenses On Demand, comments, “Offering greater flexibility, the dynamic capacity for managing applications and greater scalability, the cloud has redefined the relationship between organisations and those who provide IT services”.

Generally, as a business or an organisation grows and evolves, new processes will emerge and existing ones will change and become more important. The existing systems in place no longer fully automate the processes that are important to the organisation or have become too complex to manage without significant manual intervention.

At this stage the organisation will be assessing its options. Can they upgrade their existing systems or should they look at installing a new system (i.e. should they upgrade from MYOB to a full blown hosted or on-premise ERP system) or do they outsource the processes or functions that have become too cumbersome to an outsource organisation?

As well as the costs and disruption associated with implementing a new ERP system, the organisation may need to invest in new hardware and servers as well as operating systems to run the new software if they want to have it on-premise.

With the plethora of specialist cloud providers that have emerged over the last few years, it is now possible for organisations to download the functionality they need at the fraction of the cost to upgrading their existing systems and IT infrastructure. For example, when TNT needed to automate the tasks and activities associated with managing employee expenses rather than upgrade or extend their existing SAP system they downloaded the relevant functionality from Expenses On Demand and were up and running within two weeks.

According to Art Papas, Founder and CEO of Bullhorn a leading cloud based candidate management system (www.bullhorn.com) the Cloud has been a game-changer in the recruitment industry. “Internal IT is rarely a recruitment agency core competency, yet Cloud computing puts the same, powerful recruitment software that runs the very biggest firms in to the hands of dynamic start-ups. And, thanks to web services APIs, different cloud vendors’ software can increasingly work together to provide recruiters with a seamless workflow across the entire placement process.”

It means common business functions and tasks can be managed by IT resources that are almost as easy to access as a smart phone application. According to a survey from Equinix , however a range of concerns or issues are emerging based around latency, internet congestion, and performance predictability. These new breed of internet applications rely on data being pushed to web and mobile devices, there by placing greater and more complex need on network infrastructure.

Modern rich internet applications not only generate far more network demand (AJAX, Rich Media), but are also more susceptible to unpredictable performance. As rich internet applications generally offer richer, more frequent interaction with the user, then the more noticeable to a user are changes in application performance. The other issue arises if an organisation is utilising a range of different providers: how they manage these different relationships, and how they integrate these services into their core applications.

By Mark Atterby – Senior Staff Writer

The term SaaS (Software as a service) emerged ten years ago, with organisations such as Salesforce.com revolutionising the software market. BPaaS (Business Process as a Service) has emerged recently and promises to have as much an impact on outsourcing services as SaaS did for the general software market.

Research from Saugatek Technology predicts that Bpaas is emerging as the next major category of Cloud Computing. It is a catch all term that is increasingly being used to refer to a range of cloud enabled innovations and strategies within the broad outsourcing, BPO and shared services marketplace. By 2015, Saugatek forecasts that 50 percent of new BPO deals will be delivered as BpaaS – ie they will be significantly Cloud enabled.

Essentially, BpaaS refers to a situation where a business software application is delivered as a service that is used by BPO and outsourcing service-provider personnel performing activities on behalf of a client. Operating under a specific or unique cloud environment, the range and type of BPaaS being utilised will match the range of BPO Services being offered, including contact centres, human resources, payroll, finance and accounting, marketing and so on.

A hypothetical example of BpaaS may include an agent sitting in a BPO managed customer contact centre utilising Salesforce.com to manage the interactions with the client’s customers. The same agent may also be using a Cloud based contact centre solution to handle the actual phone calls and online communications.

The BPO market is fairly mature, where savvy buyers are expecting more and more from their providers in terms of flexibility and their capacity to scale up or down as required. The elasticity offered by deploying software and applications through the cloud gives service-providers a cost effective mechanism for ramping up or down the capacity of their operation.

Robert McNeill, Vice President for analyst firm Saugatuck Technology, commented in a recent article, “Service providers are beginning to develop BPaaS offerings across numerous vertical markets. But not all of these innovations will end up being profitable or successful. Cloud computing inclusive of BPaaS provides an enormous opportunity for service providers.

“There is a tremendous amount of internal strategy work to understand the impact of cloud IT. Service providers are focusing solution design and go-to-market strategies on new vertical BPaaS opportunities. The emergence of new vertical offerings will originate from traditional IT and business service providers that leverage a new, more efficient delivery platform for well-understood verticals in which they already sell and non-traditional cloud-based service providers with specific vertical and business IP”, adds McNeill.