Cloud Computing: Fruit of the boom

Virtual success: The Olive Centre’s Amanda Bailey depends on her company’s data

From her office in Cabarlah, north of Toowoomba in Queensland, Amanda Bailey, runs The Olive Centre, which supplies machinery and equipment to olive oil producers throughout Australia. With five staff and 40,000 customers, her business’s life blood – the company contacts database – is one of her most precious assets.

This is why she had no hesitation in July last year in transferring all these customer details to a computer cloud, a large database of virtualised servers located in huge data centres hundreds and sometimes thousands of kilometres from her business.

“We went with a cloud computing technology because it streamlines everything we’re doing and lets us link all our marketing and accounting and customer database with our website,” Bailey says. “We can access it from anywhere so long as we’ve got the internet and all the software is connected so rather than updating the same piece of information on several different databases, I just enter it once and the rest happens automatically.”

Although the technology to connect different business databases has existed for some time, the cost of implementing such a solution would have been far beyond The Olive Centre’s modest information technology budget had it not been for cloud computing.

“It would have cost more than $30,000 just to get the system up and running, and taken me hours and hours each week just to keep it going,” Bailey says. “As it is, I log in in the morning and it gives me a dashboard of how the company is going, sends everyone reminders of what they need to do that day, gives me back about four hours a day and in the longer term it means we can set up offices or work from anywhere in Australia.”

Welcome to the cloud computing revolution. By moving software applications and data out of offices and into large data centres, information technology vendors have substantially reduced the cost of sophisticated technology and made it possible for small and medium enterprises to access technology that had been limited to only large companies.

Although the first wave of cloud computing software consisted of business databases, such as the customer and sales database salesforce.com, most software companies are now developing software that can be delivered predominantly through the internet and it is more flexible as a result.

Google’s office productivity suite, Google Docs, enables many people to access and change a single document, spreadsheet or presentation, without the headache of emailing versions back and forth. Australian software development company iCiX, which hosts the certification data for suppliers to the United States retail giant Wal-Mart, is entirely web-based and is designed specifically to host certification data in the cloud.

Even Microsoft is now offering much of its software on the internet and in late April announced that its web-based products were being used by more that 40 million customers worldwide.

The technology at the core of this revolution is called virtualisation. Developed initially by a company called VMware, server virtualisation first allowed many different types of software to run out of a single large computer called a server.

The second stage, called storage virtualisation, enabled data from multiple sources to be stored across different servers, without getting mixed up or lost.

The third generation of virtualisation is bringing that same flexibility to the desktop, enabling companies to run different operating systems on a single computer, reducing the cost of upgrades and making it less expensive to introduce new applications.

The chief technology officer for Melbourne IT, Glenn Gore, says the desktop virtualisation technology released earlier this month by VMware will enable the group to offer a whole new set of remote management services to its customer base.

“We’re using it to offer a virtual desktop service to our customers,” Gore says. “It’s a fully operational computer with different software applications and data storage but you access it through a browser on any device that’s connected to the internet and we’re also using it within the company to set up virtual desktops to test new software.”

This is only the beginning. Cloud computing solutions like this one will continue to transform the way information technology is bought, sold delivered and used, with the beneficiaries being businesses such as The Olive Company and Melbourne IT that understand how to embrace this change.

BRW

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