Honesty in the cloud

Online – it’s the way of the future. I hear that so much in my technology travels, but it has never been more evident to me than at the recent Softworld exhibition in London.

The Olympia had an online accounting zone. According to one spy at the event he received numerous complaints from the more traditional “on-premise” vendors, as they are now being labelled, that there wasn’t much traffic from accountants or buyers.

This is in stark contrast to the many onlookers who swarmed to the online zone, not least because of its bright lights and enticing shiny red boards.

The more popular discussion groups centred on cloud computing, with one in particular chaired by Richard Anning, head of the IT Faculty. He had a panel including members from NetSuite, salesforce.com, FinancialForce.com and Mamut.

It was standing room only, with people straining to hear how this technology was growing and able to offer all the things that “on-premise” no longer provides.

It made me wonder how long it would be before “on-premise” software becomes legacy.

But the interesting aspect to come out of that roundtable was the honesty that not all cloud providers are created equally, according to Mamut, while FinancialForce.com stresses this is a new technology and may still has challenges to overcome.

It’s a refreshing change to hear the fears of the software industry as it ventures into new territory.

This is my first blog and comments are always welcomed. The previous blogs were written by John Tate co-founder of Tate Technology the IT consultancy