...which we developed with a telco. Then, in China, we have a cloud centre in Beijing, which is another customer centre.
Then we have Korea. And Japan, where we also have an innovation centre.
How do cloud centres and innovation centres relate to each other?
They are often co-located. The innovation centre will usually provide the infrastructure for the lab. The infrastructure is often an IBM infrastructure, and that is how we profit.
If you look at Dublin, we have six or seven research projects running at the lab there now. Some are in collaboration with government and some are in collaboration with business.
This must all present a substantial amount of investment by IBM. Isn't the objective, or one of them, to reduce the amount of hardware you need?
What we are seeing is a new way of working. But we do see things, such as in Asia, where there is a [cloud computing] project to share resource across pools of government. They did not use virtualisation. However, it will be far easier for them to move to a virtualised infrastructure, since they have already adopted this cultural change.
The cloud fits in with President Obama's message about finding ways to stimulate the economy, to bring it out of the doldrums. One way is to not just spend money on the infrastructure, but to spend it in a smarter way; to leverage the information and the intelligence, and then leverage the fact that it is a more interconnected world. So logistics, information management and traffic management can all be done in a much smarter and effective way.
What it the difference between 'the cloud', as IBM uses it, and grid computing?
I get asked this question a lot. Is this grid computing, is it software-as-a-service (SaaS), what is it? A major difference is that cloud computing is evolutionary, but it has many characteristics that make it revolutionary. But it is evolutionary, because it is a combination of all of [those things] — with a grid, with SaaS, and with utility computing, when you are metering by the hour.
All of those things can be characteristics of cloud computing. But the things that really distinguish it, that answer questions like: 'Why is it now so popular?', are things like cost reduction, speed and time to market.
The main issue is, how do you deliver it as a service and consume it as a service? We see the massive scalability that you get — the internet-scale capability — and you can access this capacity anywhere. Taken together, that is delivery as a service.
If you look at the self-service aspect of that — which is analogous to the consumer shopping experience online, when you have a shopping cart and you fill it by drag-and-drop — it becomes easy to consume. This has not been adopted in the IT world until more recently. This can go all the way from provisioning and deployment and so on, and they can do it in a self-service manner.
So now we can produce a service all across the IT system, with the services all provided through the cloud. The idea is that you do not have to go to many places, when you do development with a tool: You do some system testing, and then you deploy it. Those are the things that make it so compelling.
You see the whole thing as being virtualised?
Exactly, yes. You know this all began with IBM, but now it has developed and moved along, and now even standards are being talked about.
