The Confluence of Cloud Computing & the Semantic Web – Part 1

In the following series of blogs I will attempt to capture the nuances of the dance between these two major mega trends – Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web.

For purposes of this blog, it is suffice to say that these emerging trends have yet to realize mainstream adoption. In fact, we are still grappling with the concepts and clarity of the real value.

Just in the last couple of days I have been exposed to surveys and articles that suggest cloud computing is low on the priority list for CIOs and not well understood Study: IT jobs will drop in 2009, and the real value of the Semantic Web is suspect - The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview.

Despite the skepticism and adoption rate, both of these mega trends promise to have disruptive influences on the way we do business. These mega trends are taking well established computing ideas, and expanding them and making them work across the Internet. For many, cloud computing is an extension of grid/utility computing, software as service (SaaS), managed services platforms, web-services and platform services – What cloud computing really means.

The Semantic Web, as described by Tim Berners-Lee is an extension of the existing web paradigm, where the target audience is the human. The new extension is intended to develop languages for expressing information in a machine processable form; interoperability taken to a new level.

Tim Berners-Lee defines the Semantic Web as a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines. “The Semantic Web is a web of data, in some ways like a global database.” - Semantic Web Road Map. The promise being that computers can search, acquire, present, filter, and manipulate data in a useful way based on the data’s meaning and its relationships. This is accomplished by defining structured sets of information and inference rules that allow machines to understand the relationship between different data resources.

One of the promises of the Semantic Web is ease of integration of information across a wide spectrum of data artifacts and systems. There are solutions to the data integration challenge but require extensive transformations and one-to-one mappings between elements across systems and repositories. What puts the promise of the Semantic Web above the fray is the ability to allow a machine to connect to any other machine and exchange and process data efficiently based on built-in semantic information that describes each resource. Metadata that allows machines to understand relationships and context. This semantic information allows disparate data sources to become compatible through adopting a consistent relational model across structured and unstructured information.

Conceptually the cloud represents a ubiquitous set of computing services that are interconnected and seamlessly exchange and process information. But as Galen Gruman accurately states, in his article, What cloud computing really means, “Today, with such cloud-based interconnection seldom in evidence, cloud computing might be more accurately described as "sky computing," with many isolated clouds of services which IT customers must plug into individually. On the other hand, as virtualization and SOA permeate the enterprise, the idea of loosely coupled services running on an agile, scalable infrastructure should eventually make every enterprise a node in the cloud.”

As these mega trends mature the confluence of the two may indeed bring to fruition the promise of loosely coupled ubiquitous services that have context and are ultimately understood by machines.

In the blogs that follow I will explore what all that really means and what is the real value?

Market Sizing the Computing Cloud

When looking at the Computing Cloud from a market perspective a number of very obvious questions start to arise. How big is the computing cloud? How many companies are in the cloud. How much revenue is actually being generated by the Computing Cloud, who is actually buying Cloud services and most importantly what is the Growth and opportunity within the Computing Cloud?

My gut tells me that the Computing Cloud very well might be another disruptive technology. A game changer that transforms how applications and services are delivered to the market. But good companies don't make decisions based on a gut feels, they make them based on business models that promise a strong return on investment.

Many companies are looking at the Computing Cloud as a way of reducing costs and delivering core services to market faster. However some companies are looking at the Computing Cloud as a new market itself. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay and SaleForce.com are already in the market. Others like RightScale, who recently raised $4.5M in financing, are just now entering. How do these companies figure out what the Market opportunity is?

I have started to scan the web to try and see how much information is actually available on the topic so far. The results are pretty slim. Gartner, Forrester and the like might have some market data, but nothing that showed up on any of the public sites.

So far I have been able to find a few data points on Cloud Computing. There is a great site for registering all of the APIs available for Cloud Computing - programmableweb.com. The site not only lists all of the APIs available (755 as of this writing), but also lists the mashups that use these APIs. They also track the most used APIs, by category and vendor, by all of the Mashups. I took a couple of snapshots of the API usage and plotted it's 1 month growth, by category.

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This chart tells us a few things. First off the most used APIs for mashups are mapping. This does make sense, as many web sites are now embedding maps and context sensitive location information. All one has to do is look at the proliferation of map information within Realty web sites to see this phenomena.

Second we can see that the second tier of mashups are using APIs for Photos, Shopping, Video and Search. These are all consumer related APIs, not enterprise related. Part of this is related to the nature of mashups and the source of our data. We are not likely to see corporate activity and usage patterns within this data set. However it is interesting to note that the sum of usage for Storage, Hosting, Identity, Office and Database is less than 1/3 of the total usage for Video and only 1/20th of Mapping.

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The next chart shows us the number of mashups added during the period by Category. Again this shows us that Mapping is by far the leader. Widgets and Search also added 3 new mashups.

Summary
So what does this tell us? First off we have to realize that the data set is limited, and comes from a site very focused on mashups and the usage of APIs by those mashups. Even within that context it is obvious that Mapping is the big winner in the early use of Cloud Computing. This does make sense. There are a tremendous number of web-sites that can immediately benefit from embedding location sensitive maps directly onto their site. With the publication of easy to use map tools from companies like Google and Microsoft it is inevitable that sites would start to take advantage of them.

This trend should continue, and even accelerate. How long until every corporate web-site has an embedded Google map on their Corporate Location Page? Who is going to write their own video or photo management application when they can just embed that service onto their web site from a site like Flickr or YouTube.

The transition is now in full swing. Base services for mapping, photo management, video, advertising and other web-based services are becoming commodity applications delivered from a core set of providers. It will be left up to the rest of us to figure out how to use these services in unique and interesting ways.

Classifying the Computing Cloud

Introduction

More and more we see references to the Computing Cloud appear in articles and blogs across the Internet. Just the other day Scientific American wrote and article highlighting the shift away from traditional data centers to the Computing Cloud. You can find that article here.

This article is interesting because it talks about the Black-Box data center strategy being aggressively pursued by Sun Microsystems. In a nutshell these Data centers give organizations the flexibility to place a fully functional Data Center wherever they need it. This flexibility allows companies to realize cost savings by locating their computing power either closer to where it's needed, or in locations with cheaper power costs.

These Black-Box data centers are tremendously powerful and cost effective, but are they part of the Computing Cloud? This begs the question, "What is the Computing Cloud"? How do OnDemand applications, utilities, data feeds and Black Box data centers all fit under the same definition? Is the term Cloud Computing in danger of becoming overloaded like Enterprise Content Management (ECM). A term so broad as to be unhelpful in helping classify and understand an applications function?

This confusion has led us to attempt to start defining and classifying the broad parameters of the Computing Cloud. This is a work in progress and an exercise in understanding what is, and what isn't in the Computing Cloud.

What is a Cloud Computing Application?

As you look across the spectrum of Cloud, Utility and Grid computing a clear separation in functionality becomes evident. What's more, companies utilize the Cloud for very different purposes.

Some organizations are looking to companies like Google, SalesForce.com and eBay for user level applications; Email, Blogging, Word Processing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and the like.

Other companies see value in leveraging infrastructure level components. Offloading storage and computing power into centralized service centers enable them to benefit from the inherent economies of scale in the Computing Cloud. At the same time they can take advantage of best of breed data centers, network management and operational capabilities.

Finally companies look to the Cloud for discreet transactional information and capabilities. Want to know what the temperature is in San Francisco? Just look it up on a Web Service call at XMethods. Trying to calculate the risk associated with the Yen carry trade? Look up the current Yen to Dollar conversion rate at XIgnite.

While these Cloud Computing applications offer very different capabilities, and solve different business solutions, they do share common elements.

1. Computing Cloud applications are shared between organizations and reside on a common platform.
2. Computing Cloud applications are accessed remotely across an Internet connection.
3. Computing Cloud applications are priced using different revenue models than Enterprise and Traditional Software.
   

There are many other differences between Enterprise/Traditional applications and the Computing Cloud. However the three factors above seem to be common among all the Cloud Computing applications we looked at.

Types of Computing Cloud Applications

Different organizations use the Cloud for different reasons. By compartmentalizing the Cloud we start to understand how and why organizations use it. The natural divisions seem to be; Applications, Infrastructure and Transactions.

Applications encompass all of the services delivered directly to an end user. These are typically web-driven programs that help users with day-to-day business functions. For instance Google Desktop Apps, SalesForce.com, Microsoft Live and Siebel OnDemand CRM are all instances of Cloud computing applications.

Cloud Infrastructure components are services that provide capabilities you would typically associate with physical hardware or application development, specifically storage and computational power. Amazon is a classic example of making infrastructure capabilities available in the Cloud. Their Simple Storage Service, Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Queue Services are all instances of Infrastructure capabilities. Google's own Data API is also a Cloud Infrastructure component.

SalesForce Apex and Adobe's Apollo application development platforms are another example of Cloud Infrastructure components. Specifically these platforms give developers storage, processing and development capabilities that deploy onto a remote Cloud infrastructure. Developers can create, test and deploy entire applications that run completely within the Cloud Infrastructure which in turn gives companies tremendous flexibility to create value added applications, while significantly lowering the risks and costs associated with large scale Web based deployments.

The rest of the Cloud falls under the Transactional classification. Transactional elements of the Computing Cloud help you perform discreet actions that either retrieve, manipulate or transform data and information. Cloud Transactional capabilities range from the thousands Web Services available from organizations like XMethods and XIgnite to Amazon's Alexa services, encompassing everything from Thumbnail creation to the Webs top sites.

This leaves us with what is not part of the Computing Cloud. I would propose that while Black Box service centers are an attempt to help with some of the same problems that the Computing Cloud solves, it is not by definition part of the Computing Cloud. An organization might use a Black Box service center to deliver a Cloud Computing component but the Black Box itself is not inherently a part of the Cloud. It is just an extension of an existing network.

Additionally not all Web Services are Cloud Computing. At it's core a Web Service is just a way of communicating between two applications. It might be a key mechanism of delivering Cloud Computing capabilities, but is not inherently part of the cloud itself.


Summary

There are real fundamental issues that IT organizations are struggling to solve today. The explosion of information, connectivity and user expectations are rapidly increasing the demands put on MIS departments. Add to this the drive for cost containment present in every modern company and you have a real pain point.

Cloud Computing is beginning to offer viable solutions to these problems. By using Cloud Computing solutions companies can stop spending time on commodity Application, Infrastructure and Transactional capabilities and focus on adding real value and differentiation through their IT departments.

IT departments will use Cloud Computing for three reasons - Cost reduction of commodity application deployments, management of peaks in infrastructure demands and delivering to business segments that demand linear or exponential growth in computing power, storage and delivery.

Through the next two to three years we will see companies begin to experiment with Cloud Computing in test or pilot applications. After that companies will start to adopt Cloud Computing wholeheartedly. However, companies will not abandon their data-centers. Instead Cloud Computing will become an integral part of delivering a companies value, sitting right alongside and integrated directly into their existing network and data center.

The Big Switch

While doing research today on other blog's and sites talking about the Computing Cloud/Utility Computing I ran across a link to the book "The Big Switch" by Nicholas G. Carr. The topic, covered here, seems to be right on.

Mr. Carr seems to be covering exactly the trend we here at eCloudM are exploring.

I also ran across a great Blog written by James Urquhart covering the topic of Service Level Automation.

Service Level Automation in the Datacenter: Agile Computing Catches Up to the Data Center

There are some interesting correlations between Service Level Automation, Utility Computing and the Computing Cloud.

I wonder if using the Term Service Level Automation (SLA) causes confusion when presenting the ideas and topics into the business community. I have most often seen SLA refer to Service Level Agreements. While similar in concept, they are very different in implementation.