One of the topics of second COFES 2012 Congress was about the cloud. I want to refer to one of the most interesting quotes related cloud / internet from Alan Kay keynote at COFES 2012: Since its inception (1969) the internet was never shut down/rebooted! Which other system can boast such performance? Alan Kay at #COFES2012
Since its inception (1969) the internet was never shut down/rebooted! Which other system can boast such performance? Alan Kay at #COFES2012
— Christian DE NEEF (@cdn) April 13, 2012
The discussion during the second-day Congress was moderated by Brad Holtz and Monica Schnitger. In my view, it was one of the most interesting discussions during COFES 2012. 
Below, I put few tweet messages from #COFES2012 twitter stream that can give you some reflection on what was going on.
#COFES2012 open mike discussing: Think Cloud is insecure? Think about people walking out with your data on USB drives. — KennethwongSF (@KennethwongSF) April 14, 2012
38% of companies in my #COFES2012 engineering sw market survey say new cloud offerings will increase overall market for PLM/BIM
— Jim Brown (@jim_techclarity) April 14, 2012
Cloud is a platform, just as Win 32 was. Win 32 brought remarkable change; the cloud will too. — Mike Payne. #cofes2012 — Randall S. Newton (@GfxSpeakRSN) April 14, 2012
#COFES2012 Cloud discussing gets stormy: “some might be forced to retire.”
— KennethwongSF (@KennethwongSF) April 14, 2012
Quote from Mike Payne (thanks @monica_schnitge!) The cloud is a platform. #COFES2012 — Bruce McCallum (@BruceMcCallum) April 14, 2012
Comment: Cloud will bring collaboration revolution. #cofes2012
— Randall S. Newton (@GfxSpeakRSN) April 14, 2012
In my vew: cloud scary people to death. Mostly coz it is new and unknown. especially if / when it becomes the mainstream. #cofes2012 — olegshilovitsky (@olegshilovitsky) April 14, 2012
Unidentified comment: Cloud will disintermediation most of the vendors in this room.” #cofes2012
— Randall S. Newton (@GfxSpeakRSN) April 14, 2012
Another cloud benefit is getting away from administering apps and db on individual machines. Like the good old mainframe days. #COFES2012 — Jim Brown (@jim_techclarity) April 14, 2012
Cloud: Why? Why Not? How?
I think cloud discussions matured over the past 12-24 months. I can clearly see it in the reaction of companies and vendors. 3-4 years ago, cloud was a promise. Few vendors demonstrated successful solutions using cloud software. Among them Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and few others. The difference cloud made over the past years turned cloud into a platform. This is an important difference we need to mention. When I first started to blog about cloud solutions in PLM, the most frequent question people asked was “why”? With more and more examples of mainstream cloud deployments, it changed into “Why not”? It became obvious when few cloud services such as dropbox and some others became a mainstream. So, the question I can hear now is mostly “How?” to make cloud work in a most efficient way for a specific customer or user situation.
What is my conclusion? Cloud is a new platform. This is the best conclusion for cloud discussion at COFES 2012. Vendors will have to figure out how to make their solution leveraging this new platform and provide value for customers. Cloud platform will require us to rethink many existing concepts. It will relate to quality, speed, price, openness and many others. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
Oleg,
You forgot one important event at COFES and I quote from Deelip who was also present there.
“On the first day Tech Soft 3D had their customer conference in one of the ballrooms which included a demo of their cloud solution. Before the demo a cloud skeptic in the audience brought up the question about the lack of internet connectivity in the field. Mike Payne, CEO of Kenesto, a cloud based process automation start up, refuted and made the case that connectivity was no longer an issue. As Mike finished speaking the folks at Tech Soft 3D started the demo and the hotel WiFi crapped on itself. It was horrible. Absolutely disgusting actually. Here we are talking about the future of engineering software and we can’t even get the basics of the present figured out properly.”
Why do you not talk about how at this premier cloud event there was failure? Reading what you have to say someone could be convinced that the cloud is allready perfect in every way. Practical experience in so many areas with the internet is the reason why so few CAD users for instance want to go there and jeapordise their time and intellectual property through infrastructure failure and theft by hacking.
Can you even point to one serious CAD on the cloud success?
Dave, Think about technology hype cycle. Cloud is clearly not at the plateau level. So, some of the people and companies will adopt it earlier and some of them will adopt later. There are multiple aspects of cloud adoption – infrastructure improve, solution technology improvement. Majority of organizations relies on cloud infrastructure already today to deliver email and other fundamental services (eg. accounting, sales, etc.) I don’t see any reason why it will not proliferate to design and engineering software. I think to ask about “CAD on the cloud” success is a wrong question. Let split this conversation between CAD app, data, collaboration, sharing, etc. Just my thoughts.. Best, Oleg