There are few more hyped areas in telecom these days than mobile and the cloud. Mobility takes communications and computing devices and makes them always accessible. The cloud takes IT infrastructure and makes it (at least theoretically) endlessly scalable and flexible. So it was interesting to note the degree to which Google CEO Eric Schmidt, from the stage at this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference, stressed the intersection of these two worlds as the place where the real magic – and opportunity – happens in the technology future. PaidContent.org reports on his speech:
…it’s not the devices that are magical, but rather the powerful servers behind them that sift through billions of pieces of information to serve you recommendations in a quarter of a second. “It’s the magic behind what the phone can actually do. These new services will make your life work and in a very interesting way,” he said.
[Schmidt] said the cloud has been 20 years in the making, and only now is ready to take off. We finally have enough servers, enough high-speed networks, and enough devices that are connected 24 hours a day. He said: “The combination of pervasive connectivity and mobile devices is backed up by cloud computing.”
What’s perhaps most interesting is the expertise that both the Web and telecom industries already have in the cloud – even if they never called it that.
Every Web site and service is a cloud-based offering to some extent; cloud-centric data centers that more efficiently apportion hardware, storage and computing power only help the economics and delivery capabilities of Web providers.
Telecom service providers and mobile operators are already experts at offering communications-from-the-cloud – ie, phone service – and have been delivering hosted apps from data centers for decades.
So saying that cloud computing drives mobile communications is both profound – as well as the most obvious of statements.
What will be interesting is where the balance of power falls in tomorrow’s mobile/cloud ecosystem. Will it fall to device/OS makers, which will provide the “target” for service and application development? Will it be the content and application providers themselves, most likely a cross-section of Web/software, media and content players? Or will it be the network providers, which in the end will likely provide a large portion not only of the network connectivity but also a lot of the cloud infrastructure as well.
Look for all of these worlds to intersect in increasingly interesting ways. For instance, a deal yesterday between Vodafone (classic telecom player) and Rackspace (hosting-provider-cum-cloud-service) caught my eye, with the pair providing personal payment services to countries without typical banking infrastructure – serving more than 16 million customers in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Afghanistan and Fiji. Vodafone provides the mobile network and access to devices and customers; Rackspace high-availability hosting and real-time transaction data delivered by satellite communications.
That sort of cloud/mobile application writ large – and worldwide – shows the potential of the intersection of these two important technologies.