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.
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.
The Chicago Tribune is reporting that “Orlando became one of the first cities in America to switch all of its employees to Google e-mail.” The savings are impressive:
“If Orlando were to keep its current system, city officials estimate it would cost $133 a year for each of its 3,000 employees — or $399,000 — including annual software licenses.
Google is charging $45.50 per user, or $136,500. In return, everyone from city planners to police officers will use a Web-based e-mail system similar to Google’s popular Gmail, but without the advertisements that support the free consumer version. Google servers will store all city e-mail and run the application, and Google technicians — not city employees — will make sure it runs smoothly.
"The costs and IT support are someone else’s nightmare, and that’s what we’re paying for," Chief Financial Officer Rebecca Sutton said.”
More interesting is the confidence, dare I say “trust”, in using a cloud-based solution:
“[Google’s] Lock said Google will archive Orlando records, which must be kept and accessible under state public-records law, in "super-secret data centers."
And Cross [Orlando’s Chief Information Officer] said he’s confident city records, including sensitive law-enforcement and legal documents, will be safe from loss or cyberattack. Google has greater security resources, from people to money, than Orlando could muster on its own.
Besides, Cross said, the city last year contacted other e-mail providers, including Microsoft and IBM, about moving to the cloud.
"They gave us pricing that couldn’t compete with Google," he said.”
While the Los Angeles Google deal is much better known, Orlando led the way:
“Los Angeles became Google’s crown jewel in October, when that city approved a $7.25 million e-mail contract with the Internet giant, but Los Angeles has not yet moved its 30,000 employees to the Google system.
Google cited its deal with Orlando, which had already been signed, in its pitch to Los Angeles.”
In a reversal of classic technology adoption patterns, government agencies are cutting the path to cloud computing. Interesting times.
Positive cloud adoption metrics from reddit:
“As most of you know, we moved reddit to EC2 back in May of 2009. Our experience there has been excellent so far. Since we moved to EC2, the number of unique users has gone up 50%, and pageviews are up more than 100%. To support this growth, we have added 30% more ram and 50% more CPU, yet because of Amazon’s constant price reductions, we are actually paying less per month now than when we started.”
The reddit blog post was in response to opinions that reddit’s site had slowed since the move to Amazon. The post continues with a “nerd alert” section on the volume-based cause of the slowdown, and described the necessary changes to reddit’s database and caching architecture.
I won’t replicate the description here, but suffice it to say, scale doesn’t guarantee performance.
Session Abstract: Is your organization considering cloud computing? Are you tired of hearing about simplistic (email and calendaring), enterprise irrelevant (Twitter, Facebook), and extreme (Google Datacenter) use cases? You aren’t alone. In this session, government and enterprise practitioners will discuss the cloud computing use cases they are considering, actively pursuing, and rejecting. In addition to the use case specifics, the panelists will share insights on financial benefits, true implementation costs, assessing and managing risk, governance, standards and their cloud computing wish list.
Moderators: David W. Cearley, Gartner and Richard Soley, OMG / SOA Consortium
Panelists: Clark Dorman of Next Century, Andy Lapkin of Kelley Blue Book, Joseph Larizza of Fieldpoint Private Bank & Trust
This is the first of two SOA Consortium Panels at Gartner AADI. The second is SOA Success Stories on Wednesday. As SOA-C Program Director, I helped organize this panel. My fingerprints are all over the session abstract. more >>
