Keith Laska's Blog

By Keith Laska, Senior VP, SDL Language Technologies

Before taking Microsoft’s new “Cloud” release Office 365 for a test drive, I was excited that the software behemoth had decided to take a strong swing at the online-only, viciously free-to-cheap office productivity applications such as Google Apps and Zoho. To date, these guys have done a wonderful job of creating a ubiquitous environment of office productivity, which in my view has far surpassed the cost associated with upgrading on a somewhat regular basis. Once I passed the “user ID and login” test, I was in and ready to get silly with Microsoft Office 365 – forging my destiny in the Cloud. 

Once Microsoft works out a couple of the kinks in their 1.0 cloud strategy, they will have achieved excellence on par with Google and others, with one catch: they have an enormous, desktop and server ecosystem to slowly transition to the cloud. Some see this as a dependency and a risk. Not me. When it comes to the cloud, I’m a realist. Individuals and small to medium businesses will always be the first to fully adopt new technologies – including cloud – because the immediate cost and accessibility benefits outweigh the excessive infrastructure costs and legacy offline file storage that come along with a requirement for increased security and privacy. So it’s safe to say, in my opinion, that the first to adopt Office 365, and therefore create a lot of new, online-only content, are SMBs and SMEs, with larger businesses and enterprises steadily advancing into the cloud over time.

This is where it starts to get interesting for the language industry.

Apart from cost and compatibility, one of the biggest reasons companies use cloud technologies is that it’s just simply easier to use. For the initial small business and individual user of Office 365, in an increasing world of instant-gratification, submitting themselves to the traditional localization process (offline files, source content review, analysis, preparation, workflow process creation, resourcing, localized content review,  DTP, final layout review, post-mortem meetings) may feel like watching a snail crawl backwards. The individual cloud users of the future (in a forecasted $240bn market  by 2025), will require simplicity of work types, new business models for localization, and most certainly tolerance for “acceptable” levels of quality based on content being translated. While we can’t always predict the future, one thing we do know is that the maturity model for traditional localization processes may soon be subject to a number of stress-tests.

What do you think? Post a reply in Elevation Center!  

By Keith Laska, Senior VP, SDL Language Technologies

Ignorance is bliss. At least that’s what I thought when I started researching the millions of definitions and variants of Cloud Computing while listening to one of my favorite classics from The Doors. By distilling all of the available information I was able to clear my head for a minute, sit back, meditate and jot down the reasons why cloud computing has become so confusing….

1. Cloud Computing is anything and everything “online.” There, I said it. Technically, one can open up a browser, connect to their web-based email, open up an application on their iPhone, join a webinar, buy a product on Amazon.com, and all of this fits under the literal description of “cloud.” Why? Because the core definition of Cloud Computing is anything, sitting somewhere, online.

2. Confusion with Cloud comes from mixing “back-end” and “front-end” capabilities. People tend to get most confused when words like “SaaS, IaaS, and scalable multi-tenancy” get mixed together with “ease of use, browser-based and pay as you go.” I tend to categorize these separately to make it as simple as possible to understand without risking loss of IQ points. For me, Cloud “back-end” is techie stuff that “front-end” users should never have to worry about. Cloud back-end can be hosted remotely in a public, private, hybrid, compute cloud or any combination of those. It can rely on an architecture that allows the number of users to scale profitably without concern of outage or stalling. It allows companies to “pay as they grow” and scale server and storage capacity as and when they need it. But for the user – all of this techie stuff should be virtually seamless and hidden. Think of Google Search Engine – there is a heck of a lot of technical capability built behind that application – servers, storage, scalability to allow billions of hits per day. But as a user, all you see is that simple search bar.

3. Cloud computing explained. I then created a cheat-sheet that helped me understand the various types of cloud:

• Private Cloud. This can be information stored on your own personal PC, or corporate information held on corporate servers walled off from public access. This is basically information hosted privately, whether you are an individual or corporation.
• Public Cloud. This is information stored in a public environment, outside of your firewall. Your data could be in a server in Northern Alaska or in Southern New Zealand, but you don’t care. Because it’s secure and the most important thing for you is not where it’s held but that it’s instantly accessible and backed up. All the better for you, as you don’t have to worry about storage disks, your house burning down, or the company premises getting broken into.
• Hybrid Cloud. I liken this to the folks who will eventually swim in the lake, but are dipping their toes in to check the water temperature on a regular basis. A good example for a consumer is someone who uploads photos to Flikr for everyone to access (public cloud) however keeps backups of tax returns on a hard disk connected to their home computer (private cloud). For a company, this could mean hosting your customer data with Salesforce.com (public cloud) but hosting the data residing in your SAP implementation down the hall from your office (private cloud).
• Confidential Cloud. This is an environment where customers would like to access applications in the Cloud but would like to outsource the hosting and management to a third-party provider. In this instance, the outsourced provider manages the application, the servers and security. It’s neat for companies because they don’t have the hassle of managing all of this stuff in-house. However, it’s not as cost-efficient as a Public Cloud where you share resources, storage and bandwidth with a wider audience to reduce overall costs.

4. There is a big difference between “traditional cloud” and “future cloud.” This was the pièce de résistance that helped me understand – and effectively segment – the various definitions of Cloud Computing. For me, 90% of the technology we are using today is “traditional cloud.” In other words, our everyday lives sit in this cloud. From accessing Google Search, to our web-based email, this “traditional cloud” has been around for some time. Future or Public Cloud needs a number of trend convergences to really take hold. 

• First convergence: We must enter the World of Web 3.0 – where you no longer concern yourself with on-demand, ubiquitous online internet connectivity, it’s just there as, and when, you need it. At home, in the car, underground, in an airplane. Anywhere. This is the semantic web, where every piece of information online is categorized and accessible immediately (even your own personal profile and levels of expertise – think LinkedIn or Facebook). This may even be a world where you pay for information online. (How much would you pay to search through Google - $1 a day?)  Remember, nothing is free.  You currently pay indirectly for internet search because your information is sold to the highest advertising bidder. 
• Second convergence: The work you do online comes to you based on your skills and levels of expertise. Not so difficult to imagine. You get an interview for a job because you theoretically have skills that match the job requirement. Except in the Future Cloud, you no longer have to go to get that work – it comes to you based on your online profile. Simple, easy, efficient.
• Third convergence: There are a number of obstacles in the way of Public Cloud being adopted by the masses, which has led to a “hybrid” approach to Cloud adoption (some company information in a Public Cloud, some information in a private cloud). In order for Public Cloud to fully succeed, answers to security provisioning, storage management, data movement and bandwidth limitations need to be accounted for and solved.

In any case, clouds are all around us and multiplying quickly. Everyone’s getting on the hype-wagon and joining will probably just be a matter of time…

For more information, check out the presentation “Demisting the Cloud” – now live in Elevation Center, SDL’s virtual briefing center for cloud computing: http://events.unisfair.com/rt/sdl~cloud

In Head in the Clouds Parts 1 and 2 we laid out the landscape for differentiation on technology offerings and how this benefits both vendor and consumer of Cloud.

Now we get to look at some wicked innovation from SDL: The BeGlobal Platform (link includes great video introduction with our CEO).

In Head in the Clouds Part 1 we digested some analogies on the different types of software investments - perpetual licenses, SaaS and pay-as-you-use Cloud. Thanks guys for your comments on that last post. Let’s dive in a bit deeper…

The cloud computing vendor:

Cloud computing throws 'the baby out of the bath water' in terms of traditional commercial vendor models, as if it weren't hard enough to keep up. With perpetual licenses, a company typically recognizes the sale revenue within the month they took the order. This led to an IT-aware ecosystem of the ubiquitous "end of quarter". Software as a Service adds some up-front value for the vendor - even though you spread the recognition of a sale over a period of time, you still receive an up-front guarantee on the investment, and there are significant services surrounding the sale. True pay-as-you-go (PAYG), Cloud technology means no customization but no hassle - you pay for exactly what you use on a platform infrastructure (like self-servicing). 

Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads...

With Back to the Future's 25th Anniversary re-screening sadly behind us now, I was sitting at the weekend streaming a movie over my Internet-enabled TV, while renewing my subscription fee at the same time. Apple emailed me the weekend before asking if I wanted to renew my Apple Care contract, to which of course I capitulated. As my wife renewed her season pass for the Vampire Diaries, it hit me: In this world of modern technology that is on the brink of another bubble of significant innovation... do we actually own anything?