During the AAIA Aftermarket eForum in February, Microsoft Worldwide Director of Operations Colin Masson presented a session on cloud computing, and its potential impact on the aftermarket. He shared some additional information on the cloud with Aftermarket Business World just prior to the event.
How is cloud computing different than other forms of outsourced or hosted IT, like software as a service (SaaS)?
One of the ways I usually like to start these conversations is this: Imagine if you could have 10 times the computing power that you have today, deliver solutions in a tenth of the time, and deliver them at a tenth of the cost. And that's really the potential that the cloud has to offer. No one can really afford to ignore it. It's coming whether you like it or not.
If you look at traditional hosted models, you're really talking about two categories. You've seen infrastructure as a service, where you are basically getting that capacity available from a third party, so that's where you may go to Amazon EC2 Cloud and pay for storage or pay for virtual machines, but you have to do all the work. You have to configure that machine and load up your operating system just as you would do with an on-premise solution. It offers the benefit that you get storage capacity and computing power without having to pay for it up front, but it doesn't really address the issue of needing to be involved in setting those systems up.
The other class we've seen in the past are hosted applications, or software as a service. That's the Salesforce.com model, where you are not installing the application on your premises. In that model, you are paying a subscription and getting access to the application. Neither of those really takes advantage of the cloud.
GCommerce is an illustration of how you can provide a fundamentally different type of application or service if you take advantage of the cloud. You're not just virtualizing an existing application. There are classes of applications like supply chain management where you can have multi-enterprise visibility and collaboration. In that market, the cloud really presents a new opportunity to totally rethink the way we address those supply chain models.
We offer a platform as a service. It's not about virtualizing an existing application or delivering an application using a hosted model. It allows you to develop end-to-end solutions that take advantage of the cloud infrastructure to deal with complex, multi-enterprise problems.
What does this mean for the aftermarket?
In the case of very small businesses or repair shops, they don't want to have that investment in IT. They can get access to solutions like Office 365, which gives you email online, Sharepoint online for collaboration and sharing documents. You can have the full capability of running MS Office for a few dollars per user, and you don’t have to set up any server infrastructure.
We have independent software vendor (ISV) partners delivering industry specific applications on Azure [Microsoft's cloud platform], doing things as sophisticated as item-level forecasting where you take all the point-of-sale data and spin up as much computing power as needed, then crunch those numbers and get the results back for the company. They can do all that in an hour and get results back that can change the way they operate.
You can change the model for disseminating the catalog. You could scale support for PIES and ACES and make that available as a cloud-based offering, so all subscribers could download it.
There's also the concept of the connected car. If you can imagine all of those services being up in the cloud, you can connect an iPhone or an Android phone to your car system. You could envision, for example, if there is a potential maintenance problem, depending on what the driver has opted for, they can identify their preferred garage. Then you can trigger a whole set of services where you can route the driver to the nearest garage to get the vehicle checked out
During the AAIA Aftermarket eForum in February, Microsoft Worldwide Director of Operations Colin Masson presented a session on cloud computing, and its potential impact on the aftermarket. He shared some additional information on the cloud with Aftermarket Business World just prior to the event.
How is cloud computing different than other forms of outsourced or hosted IT, like software as a service (SaaS)?
One of the ways I usually like to start these conversations is this: Imagine if you could have 10 times the computing power that you have today, deliver solutions in a tenth of the time, and deliver them at a tenth of the cost. And that's really the potential that the cloud has to offer. No one can really afford to ignore it. It's coming whether you like it or not.
If you look at traditional hosted models, you're really talking about two categories. You've seen infrastructure as a service, where you are basically getting that capacity available from a third party, so that's where you may go to Amazon EC2 Cloud and pay for storage or pay for virtual machines, but you have to do all the work. You have to configure that machine and load up your operating system just as you would do with an on-premise solution. It offers the benefit that you get storage capacity and computing power without having to pay for it up front, but it doesn't really address the issue of needing to be involved in setting those systems up.
The other class we've seen in the past are hosted applications, or software as a service. That's the Salesforce.com model, where you are not installing the application on your premises. In that model, you are paying a subscription and getting access to the application. Neither of those really takes advantage of the cloud.
GCommerce is an illustration of how you can provide a fundamentally different type of application or service if you take advantage of the cloud. You're not just virtualizing an existing application. There are classes of applications like supply chain management where you can have multi-enterprise visibility and collaboration. In that market, the cloud really presents a new opportunity to totally rethink the way we address those supply chain models.
We offer a platform as a service. It's not about virtualizing an existing application or delivering an application using a hosted model. It allows you to develop end-to-end solutions that take advantage of the cloud infrastructure to deal with complex, multi-enterprise problems.
What does this mean for the aftermarket?
In the case of very small businesses or repair shops, they don't want to have that investment in IT. They can get access to solutions like Office 365, which gives you email online, Sharepoint online for collaboration and sharing documents. You can have the full capability of running MS Office for a few dollars per user, and you don’t have to set up any server infrastructure.
We have independent software vendor (ISV) partners delivering industry specific applications on Azure [Microsoft's cloud platform], doing things as sophisticated as item-level forecasting where you take all the point-of-sale data and spin up as much computing power as needed, then crunch those numbers and get the results back for the company. They can do all that in an hour and get results back that can change the way they operate.
You can change the model for disseminating the catalog. You could scale support for PIES and ACES and make that available as a cloud-based offering, so all subscribers could download it.
There's also the concept of the connected car. If you can imagine all of those services being up in the cloud, you can connect an iPhone or an Android phone to your car system. You could envision, for example, if there is a potential maintenance problem, depending on what the driver has opted for, they can identify their preferred garage. Then you can trigger a whole set of services where you can route the driver to the nearest garage to get the vehicle checked out
