This morning, I traded top cloud computing stories for January with David Linthicum and Bill Russell on the Cloud Computing Podcast. We had one common story, giant hint on the left. Check out our podcast.
The WSJ published an interesting article on commercial farming advances in Japan. According to the article, “The aim is to bring the concepts of lean manufacturing and continual improvement, or kaizen, to farming.”
The farmers are employing sensors, analytics, real-time location information and cloud computing to optimize planting time, crop rotation, worker productivity and threat (infection) detection.
“…Now the head of a commercial farm in the southern Japanese prefecture of Miyazaki, Mr. Shinpuku is back manning a desk with his eyes glued to a Web browser tracking every movement of his workers who handle 60 different fruits and vegetables across its 100 hectares.
"I don’t want to do this. My eyes will get bad," said Mr. Shinpuku, the 58-year-old president of his commercial farm Shinpuku Seika, which is comprised of 300 different plots of land. "I put up with it, because the benefits are obvious. Without this computer, I can’t do my job."
Shinpuku Seika is among the first farms to implement a Web-based "cloud computing" service developed by Japanese technology firm Fujitsu Ltd. Cloud computing is a loosely defined business term in which companies rent computing power from remote data centers via the Internet instead of buying machines to run software in house.
Shinpuku Seika has placed sensors out in its fields to collect readings on temperature, soil and moisture levels. Fujitsu’s computers then crunch the data and recommend when to start planting or what crops may be well-suited to a specific field.
In the past, farmers would make those decisions based on experience, but Mr. Shinpuku says a data-driven approach prevents younger, less experienced staff from making mistakes that could cost the bottom line.”
The pay-off? Measured in cabbage of course:
“The system is already paying off for Shinpuku Seika, which generates about 1.5 billion yen ($18 million) in annual revenue. Last year, it doubled the size of its carrot harvest and raised its cabbage output by 12%.”
Read the full article.
Back in April 2009, McKinsey set the cloud computing community afire with a presentation arguing that corporate cloud computing adopters might expend more money using cloud versus traditional data center resources. As reported by Steve Lohr in the NYTimes Bits blog:
“The McKinsey study, “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing,” concludes that outsourcing a typical corporate data center to a cloud service would more than double the cost.”
Many in the cloud computing space, including Gartner’s highly respected Lydia Leong, immediately took the ‘math’ behind this report to task.
My issue at the time wasn’t the math more >>
In mid-May, I tweeted my in-the-moment hypothesis on the most valuable use of cloud computing:
“Seems to me, #1 use case (value) of Cloud Computing should be Business or Business Capability Incubation. Cloud as experimentation platform.”
Some 30-odd days later, I find myself reaffirming this sentiment. Thus, the official entry into my cloud watch record.
Last week, Dave Linthicum invited me back to his podcast to discuss top cloud computing stories for May. There were no set rules on what constituted “top”. We each picked 3 stories, which we didn’t reveal to each other beforehand.
As for the results, I will say that we had one story in common, two mainstream stories (one each) and two wildcards (one each). The format was fun, so we’ll do another at the end of June.
To listen to the podcast (16 minutes or so), go here.
I’m at the Information Technology & Logistics Council (ITLC) conference on Amelia Island in Florida. I was invited here to speak on SOA. Now, I’m sitting in on a cloud computing session. The format is three mini-presentations, followed by a panel discussion.
- Chris Rafter, Solution Services Group, Logicalis, Inc.
- Jackie Baretta, CIO, Con-Way Inc.
- Dave Tezler, Oracle
- Moderator: Steve Chaffee, Logicalis
Steve Chaffee opened quoting the Forrester paper by Gene Leganza on Enterprise Architects and Cloud Computing Adoption. He also mentioned the citizen development aspect of cloud, as familiarized by Gartner.
First up is Chris Rafter, Logicalis is an IT Services Company. Chris is starting with some Cloud Computing fundamentals. After some What is Cloud? Chris is talking about how cloud computing isn’t just an IT topic. more >>
