Last weekend I attended the San Francisco LovEvolution dance-music parade and festival. It was a day rave packed with people in costumes celebrating love and dancing to electronic music. It was held at San Francisco’s Civic Center, surrounded by neoclassical Beaux-Arts civic buildings such as San Francisco City Hall.
The juxtaposition of neoclassical architecture, electronic music, and so many people in costumes made me think about festivals throughout history and in various cultures. If this were an Ancient Greek festival, it definitely would have been dedicated to Eros, god of love, or his mother, Aphrodite, goddess of love!
I also thought of Woodstock; the original, most famous and most influential American festival celebrating music, peace and love, held 40 years ago in 1969. The electronic music played at LovEvolution, which focused on synthesized percussive sounds and rhythm, was quite different from the music played at Woodstock: various types of popular music sung and played mostly on guitars, drums, and keyboards, with approximately equal emphasis on rhythm, harmony, and melody. While the music of LovEvolution and Woodstock was different, the mood of mostly young people celebrating music, dance and love was probably similar.
Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC) Datapoint 3300 terminal, introduced in 1969
Just as music has changed, computing has certainly changed since 1969; but cloud computing, today’s new model for computing, is also somewhat similar to computing back in 1969: the data are processed and stored on servers, while local machines are used mostly for application access, input and display. Users can access the servers and run the applications from any terminal that the servers support, with minimal software installation and upgrades.
Industry trade shows and partnerships are festivals and celebrations in their own right. This year, there were so many trade shows and conferences dedicated to cloud computing, and so many new cloud-computing products, partnerships, articles, reports, and surveys, that we could probably call 2009 the “Year of Love” of cloud computing!
One such partnership announced yesterday is between Salesforce.com, one of the first and most successful SaaS companies, now celebrating its 10th anniversary, and Cisco Systems, whose networking products enable data routing over the Internet, and which is celebrating its 25thanniversary. The two companies are integrating and reselling their respective products for cloud-based customer service and unified communications.
In another partnership between newer cloud-computing companies focusing on the hot area of SaaS business intelligence, Pervasive Software (NASDAQ: PVSW) and Aha! Software today announced the beta users program for Strato-Studio. Strato-Studio is an innovative, cloud-based high-performance analytics services platform available on Amazon EC2. Strato-Studio provides Monte Carlo simulation as the first of a series of next-generation, high-performance analytics services.
A cloud-computing conference occurring this week is the CloudFutures Cloud Computing for Software Vendors Conference 2009. It will soon be followed by the Cloud Futures Software Vendors SaaS Migration Conference in December. Both events are dedicated to helping traditional on-premises software vendors move to SaaS and keep up with the changes occurring in computing today.
The next festival I look forward to is the one we should have to celebrate the economic recovery, when it happens. Cloud computing will help fuel the recovery, because it will be part of the 21-percent jump in worldwide IT spending to $1.7 trillion by 2013, forecasted by research firm IDC.
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