Future of Computing
Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll - was his pen name) a mathematics professor in Oxford University, wrote in his famous book “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland“[1] some strange occurances in curious places.
To reassure herself that she understood the strange happenings, Alice says: “I’ll try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is - oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate.”
In his notes to Carroll’s book, The Annotated Alice[2], a mathematician Martin Gardner provides a nice explanation for Alice’s bizarre multiplication table. He proposes that Alice is simply using bases other than 10. For example, if we use base 18, then 4 X 5 = 20 will indeed be written as 12, because 20 (base 10) is 1 Unit of 18 and 2 Units of 1. [1X18(1) + 2X18(0)].
As a different base of mathematics is used for representing numbers in computers, like binary and hexadecimal for internal computations and calculations; and different formats like ASCII, Unicode, ISCII, ISFOC etc for displaying them to humans; We need to look at a different models of computing for hosting applications on the cloud and a different computing model for the internal functioning of the application to be hosted.
Another example to emphasis the need for different model of computing would be from the world of first Cloud - the power grid. Alternate Current (model of power) is used for transmitting power over long distances, while Direct Current (model of power) is used for operating electronic appliances internally. It may sound nontechnical to use the term model of power for AC and DC, but used the same for simplicity’s sake.
Suppose we think of an application’s core functionality, say CRM/Accounts/Human Capital Management etc to be the DC of application, and then we need to be consider the aspects like Billing, Pay-per-use, Security, and Data Integrity as the AC of the applications.
I am not aware of what the AC/DC of the future applications are going to be, but just trying to draw similarities for those who are building applications with Cloud as platform. Of course, there are many platforms and tools readily available for creating applications specific for the clouds, but most of them are targeted towards individual user, like mails, social networking, document/video/content sharing etc.
While corporate customers would look forward to Enterprise Class of applications on Cloud platform, with robust security, flexibility to tailor, to migrate from one platform to another on need basis, or totally in-house the application with data etc. we will live to see more interesting developments in times to come.
At Infosys, our R&D unit SETLabs along with ThinkTank have thought about the future needs of enterprises and are focusing on Cloud Computing. For more information about Infosys’ offering on Cloud please refer to this link.
[1] ISBN-10: 0451523202
[2] ISBN-10: 0393048470
