After the 16 intense weeks I spent with the other Fellows at Babson it's great to be back into the 'real world' and applying all the learnings to real-time business problems.

I'm in Menlo Park, CA for the next 3 months working with Sun Microsystems on their offering in the Cloud Computing market.  Cloud Computing is one of the big buzz-words in the tech industry at the moment and it is basically the idea of taking all applications off personal computers and running everything online (or "in the cloud").

An example would be email, where now many of us use webmail to access our emails and don't really care where they are stored (hotmail, or the like, takes care of that for us).  In the past we'd have stored all our emails on a single PC and only been able to access them from there.  The big advantage here is that we can now access our emails whether we are in work, at home, travelling, or wherever.

Now take that idea forward to other files you currently store on your PC - wouldn't it be handy if all your word docs, photos and music was accessible from any PC in the world?  How about from any cell phone?

Think of the potential for large organisations to store everything online so it no longer matters if someone leaves a laptop on the train.  There wouldn't be even be any need for CDs of confidential data with the potential for them to be lost - everything could be stored in secured data centers and accessed only when required.  It would mean that you'd potentialy have access to all the work done by everyone in your organisation - helping the business run more efficiently

There are many companies working to provide these services to us (check out ZumoDrive, Box.net, DropBox as examples) but all these companies need to able to handle the masses amounts of data they have to store and don't have the money or desire to build big data centers in anticipation of the demand.  This is where the Cloud Providers like Amazon and Google come in who offer up space in their data centers for rent by the hour and which can be accessed with only minutes notice.

This means that if your website suddenly becomes the next big thing you'll be able to handle the load in minutes whereas in the past it would have meant buying a new server by which time the interest would have disappeared.

I can't talk much about Sun's role in the cloud but check out sun.com/cloud for more info.  Sun are a real technology visionary and I'm really excited about riding the wave of this change in the way the world uses computers with them.

Thanks to everyone who's been forwarding me articles on the topic  - please keep sending over anything you come across.

Neil

neil.campbell @ saltirefoundation.com