Dan Kasun, the senior director of Developer and Platform Evangelism for Microsoft's U.S. Public Sector described the trends that are changing computing. I thought it was a succinct way of describing the disruption taking place today that encompasses, cloud, mobile and social media. Kasun shared his three pillars this way:
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Near limitless resources
- Cloud computing is creating economies of scale with up to 80% reduction in IT costs; e.g. Microsoft's Chicago data center is a 700,000 square foot facility that is managed by 35 people.
- He sees that cloud computing's new business model is an agent that will spur economic growth.
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Ubiquitous computing
- Broadband networking has created inexpensive and low infrastructure costs.
- In a populated society, sensors are everywhere (and eventually many of these sensors will be connected to the network)
- Gartner is predicting that by year end 2012, physical sensors will create 20% of non-video internet traffic" (i.e. temperature, air flow, humidity, navigation, sound, pressure, vibration … all tied to a location)
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Natural "human" interfaces
- Socialization is everywhere and communications have been molded to allow consistent interaction.
Kasun used an example that Microsoft has created call Eye On Earth, a mapping application of European sensor locations that display the status of air and water conditions. But the platform also allows users to rate the status of any place using social media to update the status of the environment with certain rating factors (dirty, clean, etc.). Kasun believes that this platform is a good example of mixing cloud technology with social media and human interaction.
