The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth,
The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying
This week we heard from Accelrys, Citrix and Microsoft Research how local companies can exploit cloud computing. "Cloud" computing means that data is stored and applications process that data on computers remote from the computer, mobile phone or other device where the service is delivered. You become more dependent on having a constant internet connection, but backing up your data and ensuring a basic level of service can be contracted out. Many came along to learn more, including AlertMe, ARM, Cognidox, Convergys, Deep Visuals, Eagle Genomics, GE, GSK, i2, Illumina, Imerge, Intellicate, Johnson Matthey, University of Cambridge and East Anglia, Zeus, and 4 Spanish companies visiting the region.
Some applications which move huge volumes of data (e.g. CAD, video editing, legacy databases with high I/O) will perform poorly on cloud because of the latency of the internet connection. There are also legal and compliance issues that mean that regulated companies (e.g. pharmaceuticals) who need to keep control of the versions in every level of their hardware stack and mind about the location of data (e.g. China?) will contract only for private clouds or on-premise clouds. But it is good for applications which need to spin-up new processing power quickly (e.g. Test and Development, failover) or share large datasets between different organizations (e.g. collaboration around personalized genome).
Cambridge is part of the reason cloud computing is so widespread. It is more expensive than having everything local, although we all perceive it as being cheaper because we consume "free" services like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter which are public clouds. But what makes it economic for service providers like Amazon to provide the service at all is virtualization, which reduces the cost of hardware by two orders of magnitude because multiple users can share the same physical machine. Xensource, the Citrix virtualisation product originally spun out of the University of Cambridge in 2005, is used by the two largest providers of cloud services (Amazon and Rackspace), so a Cambridge idea is part of this change in the world.
We also held one of our Cafe Networking jobs events this week. Many people seeking a new job came along to network with HR recruiters from both agencies and technology companies (RealVNC, TTP). I chatted with the Engineering Director of the UK subsidiary of a global defence company who wants to bring new electronics talent into his team. Advertising in trade press has got him 40 job applicants, of which only 2 have made it part way through the interview. Hiring from the pool of 40,000+ skilled technologists already working in the Cambridge region is attractive, and with his own background in Consumer Electronics he wants to participate in the regular stream of Special Interest Group meetings. So he'll be joining up - and looking forward to meeting you all at next week's Open meeting on developing killer internet applications!
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