PC to PCC – Is it Inevitable?

Transition from Personal Computer (PC) to Personal Cloud Computing (PCC)- Is the change on its way?  It’s my opinion that personal computing is destined for the cloud in coming decades inspite of the fact that there is lot of debate surrounding cloud security and privacy. Here are few reasons for this belief

Storing information on traditional PCs / notebooks is secure as long as you do not connect them to internet. In this age of collaboration and social networking, we connect these personal devices all the time to internet. More often than not, the documents, photos, spreadsheets, emails, bookmarks, etc we create on our local PC is shared in some form or another with our social or professional colleagues, and managed somewhere in the cloud. Are we giving ourselves a mere erroneous perception of security by keeping these artifacts locally?

In my work career of 10 years, I have purchased 4 desktops/ laptops so far. Talk to a computer hardware maintenance division head of your IT company and you will be surprised to find the investment they make every year just to maintain/upgrade the currently running PCs in the company. Now envision a cloud based service provider there who offers one of thousands of virtualized, metered, capacity-on-demand PCC services. Your PCC never needs to be replaced or upgraded, and you can switch provider at your will.

How many times in a highly demanding workday have you felt the need of modifying the same presentation from your office laptops, home PCs, handheld mobile devices and other internet enabled devices. Would it have made work easier if this presentation lived in the personal cloud? You wouldn’t have worried about maintaining a persistent logical ‘session state’ across the array of digital devices you own.

Watch this video on Pogoplug- A device you can use to create your own personal cloud for your connected life.


So what do you think? Is this seamless, anytime, anywhere access to a personalized virtual computing instance is in our future. Leave me a note if you think there are that will stop its adoption in coming decade.

image credit:Ted Haeger

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Is traditional Manager a history?

Today, I happened to pull out historical records of the IT program I am managing for last 3 years at my company. While doing some data churning, a unique observation stuck my mind – Till date over 62 people from different units of my company have directly or indirectly reported to me in this program in multiple capacities and at various intervals of time. About 70% of this workforce was out of sight as a result of globalization or virtualization of workspace. I know all of them by name, did work with them for months, have talked to some of them over phone at least 5 times a week and very well know the competencies for few of them but have never got a face to face opportunity to say ‘hello’ to most of them.

This makes me wonder how little line of sight and direct control I have over the work these team members do today. I still remember my early days when organizations were following military developed hierarchical practices where managing people and work was based on command and control. I had my superiors sitting next door to me and I learnt my management style and leadership on job from them. They use to correct every single mistake of mine at work. There was a personal touch and direct oversight. We use to see every single person in office, greet them with smile on the face every morning and use to go for morning and evening tea together as a group.

Gone are the days when I use to stand up in my cube to see my teams sitting all around the floor churning code. The work is still getting completed and several flawless deliveries go to my overseas client round the year. Teams have become way bigger, global and virtual. Most projects and initiatives have become cross units to take advantage of diverse expertise and skills needed to handle multi technology programs. Does this essentially mean, team members are self managing themselves and time has come when we don’t need managers or need fewer managers?

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From behind the (fire)wall to the cloud

Being in an IT services company, I envy product vendor’s sales reps job. Whenever they bring any new product to their customers, the promises they make are just too big to believe and the jargons they use are just too confusing to the customers (like the subject of this discussion). One of my clients who made 6 digit investments in buying all the hardware, security suites and BPM packages to implement one-off BPM programs using SOA principles was given the sales pitch that public cloud computing is the way forward for BPM.

Imagine the state of the client who has not even seen the break-even for her investment is given one hour session on new technology buzzword cloud computing. As soon as she was released by these sales reps, she was aghast and came by my desk …. Is public cloud computing going to replace traditional enterprise IT?

Donning my IT consultant hat, I said I don’t think so. Public cloud computing won’t replace traditional enterprise IT however few years down the line service IT providers may sell business services using the new technology of virtualization. But rest assured your recent investment in BPM tools and hardware will not go waste. You will still need privately hosted hardware, customized services for your key business processes whose security, privacy, performance and availability cannot be compromised.

As this virtualization technology matures and organizations gear for adopting BPM enterprise wide, they may see cost advantage in moving certain BPMS components to public clouds like

• business process modeling and analysis tools, repositories


• collaboration and social networking tools


• test and demo environments


• monitoring and optimization components

But at any point of time, it is not practically possible to move all IT business processes hosted behind the fire(wall) to the cloud.

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