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Bill Sempf
4.0
Description:
Return on Investment is key for large and small organizations in these risky times. A key mitigator of ROI risk is the avoidance of capital expenditure on IT infrastructure. While traditional Application Service Provider style hosting services do fit this bill, there is a new service on the horizon that has key benefits over the ASP model - cloud computing. Cloud computing leverages virtualized resources to isolate the developer and user from details of the infrastructure, while spreading infrastructure capital expenses over a large number of hosted applications. Bill will discuss the realities of hosted applications, including the current popular ASP models, and compare them to cloud computing. There will be an overview of cloud computing architecture and strategy. He will end with a comparison of various commercial cloud services, including Google AppEngine, Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure.
Bill is an enthusiastic and confident speaker. This specific presentation of this talk had a minor hiccup regarding the explanation of the supply/demand chart, but otherwise went very smoothly.
The content could be improved by adding more information about the types of applications that are and are not well suited to the cloud, how "SOX", HIPPA, and other specific regulatory requirements impact the suitability of the cloud for affected applications, and how the fact that cloud platforms can enable applications to scale up and down dramatically in minutes instead of many weeks (with "utility billing" having an increment of an hour or day instead of the typical ISP model of monthly billing) can impact business decisions. One example might be that companies could implement significant promotions with far less infrastructure risk.