There's a fascinating article I just found this morning on InformationWeek that discusses the vision of Apple creating a cloud computing environment for enterprise mobility.
Now mind you, I have written on more than one occasion about the merits of mobile cloud computing, but this article provides an interesting twist on the idea.
One of the first paragraphs in the article says:
The tricky thing, of course, is that such an undertaking would require political skill, personal will, technological vision, marketing muscle, a big and bustling built-in base of followers, and lots of charisma. Oh, and I almost forgot: since enterprise mobility is the target, then it sure would help to also have some sway over a mobile brand that business users are crazy about.
I think it's a lot more complicated than that. I'll argue it's almost impossible to create ONE enterprise mobility cloud.
First and foremost, let's erase the myth about THE proverbial cloud. There are many clouds. Amazon has one, Microsoft is very busy building out it's Azure strategy, and Google is certainly not just sitting on the sidelines on this topic. Heck, do a search on your favorite search engine on the topic and you'll get a gazillion results. There are also solutions from companies such as Salesforce.com that have arguably been in the cloud before there even was one. So how can there be one singular place where an enterprise can have access to all the applications it uses/needs? I'm not sure there can be.
To Mr. Evans' point, it would take GREAT political skill to have ONE company create the necessary relationships with all the major enterprise application vendors including SAP and Oracle (and in case you didn't know this, they HATE each other)...or to be able to create the hooks with all the cloud service providers
The other issue with SaaS solutions is that they are typically (but not always) WYSIWYG - there is limited customization that can be done. The challenge I see here, is that every company is going to have different systems, and even if they were to adopt the same platforms, they're going to need different tools/data/forms. Who is going to be able to provide that level of customization while providing a broad level of support for the myriad platforms out there? I don't think anyone can (yet)...hence where compromise comes in. And that's where the argument for the iCloud breaks down further.
Compromise will provide a complete stack of applications & services, but you'll have to pick from the (limited) options available. That may work for you, and it may not. My suspicion is that this could work wonderfully for the SMB space, but the enterprise? Not so much in my opinion. This is why there will be a huge market, in my opinion, for third party Systems Integrators to connect various clouds together. I call this SOA for the Cloud (I can't find the blog post where I discussed this previously, but trust me on this).
Then we get to devices. Mr. Evans' last point talks about the importance of the iPhone as a great platform to view cloud applications. I'll argue the opposite (there's a shocker).
If the cloud is done "right," then there's no difference what device you use, as long as the browser can properly render the HTML. I even asked in January of this year if you need an OS on a mobile device.
Five of the six major computing platforms either currently support or plan on supporting WebKit, making it now the defacto mobile browsing standard. How would this help Apple sell more iPhones? The only thing I could imagine would be if they created an enterprise grade version of MobileMe, but that would go against the grain of heterogeneous mobile environments, and I don't think even Apple is strong enough to buck that trend...unless of course you are targeting the SMB space.
Do you agree or disagree?
