Apple is the No. 1 Client Device

A report out by Canalys on the final quarter of 2011 puts Apple ahead of HP as the preferred client device amongst corporates and consumers. Who would have ever thought that? Apple as the domain of geeks and marketing agencies is officially a thing of the past. Ty, you were right all along.

Some will say that this is wrong accounting as it includes iPads and iPhones in the total - but this is the entire point about the rapidly shifting client device market in corporations, the device is fast becoming the choice of the user not the company.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a real phenomenon and it is helping Apple become a corporate standard in a world traditionally dominated by PCs and Microsoft. 

Learn a lesson, everyone. There is not a penny of discount given for Apple products whether it be an iPod, iPad, iPhone or a Mac and they are top of the range end user prices. The PC market has been long rated as a commodity market and wags will tell you that Apple would never become a corporate standard as resellers and Apple itself never negotiate. That's another myth busted as Macs continue to grow and take market share off all the main players like HP, Dell, Lenovo and the rest. The PC market is no longer a price sensitive, high competition market - Apple have redefined the way to sell.

How did Apple do it? By winning the hearts, minds and wallets of real users through innovation, ease of use and entire new ways to buy products and applications. Incredibly, real users have gone back into corporations and not asked but demanded that their tablets, smartphones and, now, Macs be attached to the network even if they foot the bill themselves.

Microsoft, HP, Dell, everyone, never saw this coming that not just Apple but their operating system would take a massive chunk of the world dominated by the PC. Recent figures released by Microsoft show that they can no longer rely on consumers for their profit - now they are being squeezed in corporations.

The pace of change is incredible and none of the mighty companies saw it coming. Apple is the No. 1 client in corporations.

Pinch yourself, it's real.

Is Billing Aggregation the Nirvana in the Cloud?

If you want to buy Salesforce.com the most common way is to work out what you need in seats and the types of user, then work out the monthly total charge, multiply it by 12 to get the annual fee then add any project management work to go in and you have your first bill. Eh? You mean that despite the advertised monthly fee you actually pay annually up front?

Actually as a residue of the world of SaaS this is exactly how Salesforce.com operates. As did my company, PlaceWare. Even with a minuscule discount for cash offered, most companies paid the annual charge up front rather than pay monthly.

Here's the even dafter thing, companies buying the Salesforce.com actually accrued the charge monthly to the profit and loss account despite paying annually. Meanwhile, Salesforce.com themselves smoothed the revenue recognition equally over the 12 months for the seats while recognising any project management fee up front.

So why this difference in the cash and P&L? The old way of buying software was on the capital account - pay up front but depreciate the 'asset' over 36 months. Salesforce.com offered to not use the capital account but to pay for the software through overheads as a service while saving the cash account the extra two years. So to some extent, paying annually up front represented a positive on the cash-flow versus the old way. And it stuck.

Until now there hasn't been that many mainstream successful Cloud software offerings with the exception of Salesforce.com, and maybe NetSuite, Taleo, Workday and a few others. SaaS has kept its little notion of paying 12 months up front as a peculiar thing to software. You even get it to some extent in buying storage space as Dropbox, Box.net and others all advertise monthly costs but charge annually.

The next wave of the Cloud, where many more software packages will migrate to the Cloud, is reckoned to be offered a different way. Gone will be the days of up front annual charges but monthly invoices will be payable for all the software licences consumed by companies. Currently, firms average less then 2 or 3 Cloud based software services each in the US and that's considered relatively high adoption. Most SaaS is offered directly from the vendor and so there is no middle man reseller involved in the main. So it is easy to provision and charge in a certain way.

But the next wave could be very different. For one, it's likely to use channels to a much greater extent. Why? Because most of the new entrants into Cloud based software will be traditional software vendors migrating their offerings as a web alternative. They will most likely leverage the channels they already use to service customers and so resellers may be selling multiple SaaS offerings from varieties of vendors to lots of end users. Pretty soon, keeping track of all those licences in play will become a pretty intensive task.

But if the end users are only buying 2 or 3 SaaS offerings, why would they be worried by over complexity of bills? Might they still be happy to buy the service paying annually but smoothing the charge over the P&L monthly? In the case of larger companies that may be the case - they have deeper pockets and can negotiate harder. But SMEs will be different. For one, they are greater credit risk to resellers and vendors and secondly they have less inclination to pay up front for 12 months, is the theory. But secondly, one of the great advantages of the Cloud to SMEs is that they can smooth costs for IT as they scale rather than having pump, cash-intensive periods of investment - each incremental user is a simple additional monthly cost.

So the aggregation of bills on a consumptive basis is seen as the way forward. Companies offering billing platforms which will take all that sold licence information, storing the history and producing one monthly bill based on the amalgamation of all that information per end user is important.

Well, not actually as important as it will be for the resellers who will have to produce bills for all their customers. It's actually the layer in between which has the greater need. End users may be happy to consolidate bills as usual - after all they have multiple bills coming in from multiple suppliers already with enough staff in accounts to deal with it. SMEs may appreciate an amalgamation service but realistically isn't that what their credit cards are for?

If an SME buys its SaaS on a monthly credit card account, all the bills will be in one place with an average 30 days credit.

Resellers, meanwhile, will have tons of data to deal with and those distributors who offer an aggregated billing service will be adding significant value in the supply chain. The question is - how much will that service be worth? 

Today, if you want to pay for Salesforce.com monthly, you can get it with a finance charge through a select band of resellers or you can play really hardball with the vendor themselves and they will cave in if the deal is big enough. But will all vendors operate the same way?

What if the aggregators offered monthly billing to resellers but the resellers charged up front for 12 months? What if the aggregators bought all licences with 12 months in advance but billed monthly with a finance and service charge added? In general it means that software bought via aggregators will inherently be more expensive as the cost of the service and any finance will have to be added. This reduces the reseller margins. Some high end resellers will possibly be able to afford their own aggregation billing platform and make more money in the long run.

Most companies have not considered the transformation of billing services required to support the Cloud. Things are going to get complicated and most current billing systems do not perform well on monthly recurring billings and the burden on cash collections is heavier. Meanwhile, if cash collected is only one twelfth of the annual fee then cash-flow is hit a little harder for the reseller making that hyper jump to the Cloud all that much harder.

The end result is that there is a lot yet to play out in the world of Cloud software billing. Services like cohosting already have moved to monthly billing and cash but software has not. Will it really change or will the original SaaS vendors' models of annual collections up front pervade?

Will aggregators provide enough value to charge for their service to resellers and possibly end users? Will this new billing model negate some of the cost benefits and ROI that Cloud purports to offer over on-premise solutions? All this has yet to really play out.

However, if you run the numbers on Microsoft Office 365 over on premise Exchange or even Hosted Server Exchange, there is little or no cost benefit of moving to the Cloud. The only saving could be monthly billing and payments. Surprise, surprise - Microsoft's most popular payment method is 12 months in advance.

Either the end users are a strange lot or some assumptions about the monthly billing models are wrong. The answer has yet to be clarified.

How to Win the Lottery in 2012

Here's a sure fire tip for 2012 - you have to buy a lottery ticket to win, so make sure you buy one. That is sound advice, as I can guarantee that if you don't buy a lottery ticket, you won't win.

The odds of winning are pitiful some might say at some 48 million to one for a jackpot win. However, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the odds of you not winning if you don't by a ticket are infinite.

With these sure facts in your mind, your strategy must be to go on line or to a participating shop and buy a ticket - this will dramatically reduce your odds of winning as a first step. Buy two and you exactly halve the odds again. Buy 10 and you will reduce your odds tenfold.

OK, let's wise up. Even if you buy ten tickets, your odds of winning a jackpot are no better than 4.8 million to one, so it's not much of a chance. Even if you buy a thousand tickets, then you are still looking at odds of around 50,000 to one which is still a very long shot, considering you would statistically have to buy the same amount for each draw to stand a chance.

In business, you wouldn't invest in opportunities at such odds, would you? Yet, many businesses will sign up in the new year for snake oil schemes to accelerate their business with secret panaceas sold by ebullient former salespeople who have slipped their cocoon of mediocrity in their own sales careers and suddenly found the obvious things they missed. Now they are selling them at nice profits.

Have you ever been intrigued by these adverts you read in papers about how to become millionaires in short order? When you send off for the literature it tells you that you should place an advert in the paper telling people how to make a million and then charge them for reproducing the same document you received.

Everyone wants to the answer on how to make quick riches. Everyone is selling the solution. The secrets of life, of self-confidence, of social media marketing, of sales success, of business knowledge. Some of these courses may well give some great ideas which can be implemented in the short term but few give the elixirs of future and sustainable success.

Why? Because people are funny things. Some days they are on top of their game, sometimes they are not. Some just aren't cut out for the role they are in, some are. Some may gain knowledge and leave, some may have to be paid more than others. 

Acquiring, developing and nurturing talent is a long term business for companies. People are incredible machines as they are the only intelligent beings in the Universe, as far as we know, and they can outperform any computer over a wide range of tasks. Develop them well and they can be incredibly adaptable. Motivate them cleverly and they will jump off cliffs for you. But keep them in a dark cupboard with no light and they become as dumb as mushrooms to the business.

When it comes to developing new business opportunities, it's fine asking for general purpose advice or training - that will help give the background tools for the job. But some people have specific knowledge, skills and connections and can help your teams 'see' the opportunities more quickly, gain success more transparently and help teams develop the skills for the new markets more quickly by actually doing what's required rather than talking about it.

Putting the specific power you require into the opportunity you want, when you want is a fast track way to gain success. Most other methods are as 'Hit and Hope' as buying tickets for the lottery. You may get lucky with a specific course but underlying selling skills are only a pre-requisite. Knowledge of markets is more valuable. In my lottery analogy, you are far more likely to win if you know the numbers that will be drawn - buying the ticket is only the pre-requisite to potential success.

So as you go into 2012 and look at the available opportunities in the Hi Tech markets, think not of buying lottery tickets but placing your valuable investment money into acquiring specific skills and knowledge, even if this is for the short term only. People are incredible machines, they can even learn and they do so better from watching others.

Get the right skills in, at the right time, to do the job you require for as long as you need it. The other members of your team will learn faster from watching success being achieved in front of their eyes.

It's the way I have worked with companies. Roll up your sleeves, show people how to win without talking about general, esoteric concepts. Don't just make contacts and widen your reach, target and value contacts, covet and nurture them. Social networking is a great shotgun but NOTHING replaces the value of individual, tailored, knowledgeable communication and interaction with specific follow up activities.

Nothing speaks louder than actions with successful outcomes. All the rest is just words.

Merry Christmas! You're A Security Threat

If you are the proud recipient of a shiny tablet or state of the art smartphone this Christmas and you plan to use it at work, attaching to the corporate network to download emails and some data, then you are a security threat.

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is fast becoming the biggest threat to corporate security as people synchronise files over all their devices, regardless of whether they are company owned or not, using technology like Box.net, Dropbox, Evernote, Microsoft OneNote and Google Docs. It's the biggest advantage of the new age of such devices and the emergence of Cloud applications to enable such working. But that massive advantage to productivity comes at a cost.

To date, CIOs reamin somewhat laissez faire to the whole issue, but all you need is an executive's iPad or smartphone to get stolen and, suddenly, a non-company owned and controlled asset could be in the hands of a nosy stranger or, worse still, a thief. Although some devices can require the input of a 4 digit pin, that could be fairly easy to get around. Then you have all the applications on the device that have accessed the corporate data, like email and office productivity tools and any files that may be shared on common storage areas.

While there are ways to protect the machines and the data more rigorously, few fall under the remit of the central security policy of big companies - and that has to be a Governance issue at minimum. In the world of the US SOX regulations, that could be corporate negligence which Directors sign up to personally.

It isn't actually the users' problem, you might argue. But as many of the users of BYOD devices are company directors or senior management then I would argue there is a responsibility in many cases.

This year, BYOD will raise its head on the agenda of many big companies but it will be hugely important to SMBs too. As more technology moves into the Cloud, it may become less easy to know exactly what assets are accessing your network and where. 

Companies like Bradford Networks have a strong solution tuned to the BYOD threat to turn it from threat to a major productivity opportunity. 

You just have to make sure you control of the access to data on your network. It's been the core requirement of IT departments and remains so.

Cal +44 207 193 2356 for more information.

How Small Businesses Can Benefit from the Cloud

Let's be honest, there is no shortage of adverts of who can offer hosting location space, set up a number of virtualised servers in a building, offload your storage back up or give you some point solutions like email systems you have never heard of. That's tow a penny out there.

That's all very well but is it really helpful to an SMB company looking at the array of IT things that it has, not just servers and storage, but infrastructure, networking, end points, printers etc. How do they really take their entire IT requirements as a whole and get some benefits out of the true scalability of the Cloud without hassle and from experienced businesses? The biggest issue is that lots of companies have parts of the solution which often requires change and upheaval, few have a total, single answer and can then charge your entire IT management as a single monthly charge. If you are a large sized company you might buy an HP Cloud Matrix system for a low end of £120k but that's no SMB solution while other companies look to outsource your IT and that's no good to an SMB either.

independenceIT hailing from the US are one such company that can really help revolutionise your IT and embrace the true scalability advantages and cost efficiencies in the Cloud for all your IT, as it stands today. And it's that last statement which is vital - all your IT including servers, storage, infrastructure, devices such as printers, desktops, laptops and smartphones - all of it gaining the advantages of the Cloud. And all your applications too. Today.

The crucial difference here is what companies like independenceIT offer is to take your applications into the Cloud. This is not selling 'Capacity on demand' which is the focus of just about every Cloud company today or managing point solutions but it is 'Capability on demand' - allowing SMBs to properly scale their organisation in a truly logical and manageable way both from an IT and cost sense.

Take a company with say has less than 100 PCs and laptops, some smartphones, running MS Exchange and OMS Office applications, some CRM and accounting, maybe with some other applications, printers and networking. independence IT manages the whole lot into the Cloud, easily and smoothly, and then returns the capability back in the form of a single charge per desktop per month. Supporting over 300 business applications in its portfolio, independenceIT has experience of running all business grade applications and can help you now.

Imagine having the benefits of a large company IT outsourcing in the Cloud for a single charge per desktop per month of around $100 for your whole IT requirements now and in the future.

That's the power of the Cloud to the SMB and independenceIT brings that scalable power of 'Capability on demand' to SMBs today. For more information call me on +44(0) 207 193 2356.

And resellers, distributors, Telco and Service Providers are are welcome too.

Where are the IT Companies in the Virgin Fast Track 100?

There was a time when Hi Tech companies dominated the Virgin Fast Track 100 - I worked for Eyretel for a while when they won it on the back of their growth in the digital voice recording business sold in the City.

This Sunday, the list published by the Sunday Times shows a very different landscape with only online retailers qualifying as Hi Tech and there are barely a half a dozen of those in the Top 60 while there are a couple of phone retailers and just one Telco reseller scraping in at 60th in the Top 60.

No software companies, no computer maintenance companies, no online computer vendor, no computer resellers, no accessories companies, no Apple App producers - in fact, the first computer associated company comes in at 62 and it's an ink cartridge recycling company.

Refreshingly, there are plenty of recruitment companies in there although I understand the Hi Tech recruiters are suffering while Telecom resellers starts to sprout up with growing frequency after 60th place. 

After Robert Peston's program last night, it was chilling to see that one of the fastest growing companies in Britain is an Equity Release broker as we all struggle to manage debt and provide for our retirement somehow.

It is perhaps a sign of the times that Hi Tech companies are missing from the Fast Track 100. Amongst computer resellers, insolvencies are up, gross margins are getting tighter and competition remains fierce. The PC market is dropping like a stone as the client device markets change, server shipments are static if lowering - what can a struggling reseller do to change its fortunes?

On page 8 is a small article by a very good friend, former colleague and business partner of mine, Scott Dodds who is now GM of business strategy and marketing at Microsoft UK. Scott points out how smaller companies are embracing the Cloud to help them grow faster and he highlights one of the Fast Track Companies called Gritit who unsurprisingly are making hay while we experience harder winters.

What Scott points out is that small companies can save on IT costs and scale their business faster by effectively outsourcing their IT to the Cloud so that small companies can focus on what brings in sales rather than back office issues like IT.

I think there is a step further to go. Companies like independenceIT go beyond just putting a few applications like email, back up and CRM into the Cloud but allow SME businesses to push the management of their entire IT infrastructure and applications into the Cloud and have it served back to them at a single monthly cost per desktop. As traditional hosters like Rackspace or Fasthosts really offer just the renting of resource, independenceIT offers a true managed service that allows SME companies to scale not just their resources but their applications for as single monthly charge.

There are no capital outlays, just single monthly fee per desktop - all the rest is taken care of using Tier 1 datacenters and giving the highest availability and support.

Scott and I agree, the Cloud is definitely the best way a small business can grow its IT base and I think independenceIT has a unique and compelling proposition for this. For resellers who want to get back into growth mode and be able to offer a true managed service to customers without all the massive outlay, independenceIT have a fantastic solution to help get growth back in your business - profitably.

Please get in touch with me for more information on +44 (0) 207 193 2356.

Cloud - Capability on Demand

A recent article caught my eye where a company called Doyenz asserted that in 2012 there would be a slowdown in the need for Cloud storage, i.e. the need to keep piling more data in the Cloud.

In some respects they are right as they also predict that the Cloud will become more about applications on demand rather than data. This echoes and an article I wrote a while back about the concept of of 'Capability on demand' rather than 'Capacity on demand' as a driver for the Cloud. But applications generate data so let's not get too hasty.

I am working with a company called independenceIT who have exactly this view of the Cloud. It's really of no great use just putting data into the Cloud on places like Dropbox, although such sites serve a good purpose in the short term. What companies will really want out of the Cloud is a solution that takes their infrastructure, resources and applications off their hands and then serves them back as a completely managed and automated solution for which they pay a fixed monthly fee per desktop.

This flips the whole hosting industry on its head so that companies can get true economies of scale rather than just places to plant their data and get only the advantages of capacity on demand.

If anyone would like to know more about independenceIT and truly be able to outsource their entire IT resources including applications and leverage the Cloud to its fullest extent either as channel company offering the solution to its customers or as an end user seeking the efficiencies of the Cloud, just drop me a line or call.

Calx Europe is a Business Acceleration company specialising in working with Cloud software or service providers to develop and implement go to market plans in Europe. Please call +44 (0) 207 193 2356 for more information.

My Top 5 i-Technology Predictions for 2012

I have been doing a bit of Mystic Meg'ing and you can find my predictions published by Jeremy Geelan of Cloud Expo Inc.

Nigel's i-Technology Top 5 Predictions for 2012.

Feel free to challenge or agree!

An early Happy Cloud Year 2012.

Buying Software in the Future

Steve Jobs was an incredible man - I think we all agree on that. But to my mind, amongst all his innovations and acumen what he did to converge the mobile and computing market was stunning. I think it was just the first steps in an exciting journey.

Recently, the CEO of Tech Data asserted that smartphones were the products to watch in the next year or two and he knows a thing or two about products as his company sells around $25bn of Hi-Tech kit a year. So it seems the world is set to ride the tsunami of mobility products - smartphones and tablets to the fore.

This has been much the domain of the consumer until recently when we all started to turn up to work with these products that we bought with our own money and insisted they should be put on the network and to heck with the security risks. This 'Consumerisation of IT' or 'BYOD' thing is becoming a huge issue but it brings opportunity.

So what did Steve Jobs do that was so amazing? Well Vodafone and the likes had toyed with sending applications and things to the phone for a while but it was all a bit disjointed and ineffective. Jobs turned it all on its head. He brought the world of computing to the mobile industry by not just inventing a great smartphone but by re-inventing how applications were to be delivered to the phone and he encouraged hundreds of companies, small and large to develop Apps. And he cut out the phone companies from the action. And he cut out the channel from the action too. It was all owned and delivered by Apple - just as he had done with iTunes, the App Store revolutionised the way software is delivered first to phones and then to tablets - and where next?

Unlike Microsoft who opened up the PC market for everyone to develop in, Apple opened up the phone but took on the role of software distributor by providing the only outlet to get the product. And it takes a sizeable cut of the sale for doing so - much more than a distributor would. By creating this bond with its customer, Apple has also become the fastest growing Cloud storage company in the world when they delivered iCloud. Suddenly the bonds with Apple get stronger and it spreads across the spectrum of Apple iPhone, iPad and Mac computers. This is a superb business model for the future as you can just layer on more products and services easily.

So is this the template for the future of PC software purchases? As yet there has been no great move by a single large company to try to emulate Apple but there are few parallels in the PC industry other than Apple themselves. This leads me to think that the software hypermarket company of the future has yet to emerge.

I can imagine a company setting up an AppStore software hypermarket and aggregating as much software as possible for consumers and small businesses to buy - both traditional perpetual licence software and Cloud based. Such a company could cut out traditional channels as Apple have done. It's not as easy to do as Apple have farmed their own base in doing so whereas there are loads of PC vendors out there. 

That's why I think the software store of the future will be independent of vendors and potentially not of the channel today. Now who could that be? Amazon? Google? Wal-Mart?

Calx Europe is a Business Acceleration company specialising in working with vendors and channel to develop and implement strategies in the Cloud market. Call +44 (0) 207 193 2356 for a no obligation discussion.

The Channel is Dead, Long Live the Channel

This Cloud thing is making vendors do some potty things. Lots of them are investing greatly in their own hosting capacity and then they try to circumnavigate the channel in terms of dealing with the end user. Yet they also want to use the channel's leverage in customers to get recommended for the sale, recognising the role the channel plays in reaching so many customers.

Something tells me this is not a long term business model that has sustainability.

Channel executives are canny folk. They survive most onslaughts on their business and barmy channel strategies by vendors with ever decreasing margins and hoops to jump through and still grow at the end of it. The trouble is that customers just keep on buying. Vendors just don't seem to get all this as they continually claim that Resellers and Distributors offer less and less value yet more and more is bought from them.

Broadline Distributors are a great example of this - the mighty Ingram Micro and Tech Data should have died long ago according to vendor executives if they really do provide no value in the channel but they keep on turning in growth. And they still are the 'Go To' guys when vendors need a favour.

So why is Cloud so much different? And why are vendor executives at some of the top firms in the world so convinced that this time distributors will whither on the vine and die? Perhaps they ought not to say it too loud in case the distributors hear and they might live to regret those words.

All is well at the distributors. Numbers look good, margins are holding with a few collywobbles about supplies of this and that from Thailand and the 'will they, won't they' at HP but by and large things are pretty rosy. It's fair to say as the phenomenon of 'Bring Your Own Device' takes hold, some of the distributors are getting uppity about revenues flowing through things like airtime providers or App Stores but they can't complain too much when they also supply smartphones, as in Tech Data's case, by the bucket load. 

In fact, most distributors are pretty sanguine about such vendor comments that their value ceases in the Cloud. They adopt their hardy pose and say, 'Well we've survived all this industry has flung at us yet' and knuckle down. Much of what they do is for the now as annual, quarterly, monthly and daily numbers drive their mentality and so thinking about what might be in 2015 is usually just a number in someone's imagination. What the business might look like then is not the thought du jour.

Somewhere along the road, vendors and distributors with the rest of the channel need a meeting of minds or else things just might get a bit messy out there. 

Just this morning a VAD Distributor in the Cloud reckoned aggregation platforms at distributors were the domain of only broadliners. That's a naive way of looking at things and although it may conflict with large resellers, the fact is that distributors have a huge presence in the mid-market where no one can afford such costly systems right now nor the problem of running them alongside their current ERP. Let distributors scale up theirs.

The risk here is customer stickiness. If a distributor does this right then it can aggregate the sales of all resources, products and services a Reseller sells on a single monthly bill. It will accumulate vast history, even bill-on-behalf of some Resellers. Effectively it will become both the bank and the back end system for thousands of Resellers and just as it is hard to change your ERP system overnight, it will become equally hard to change your distributor once you commit Cloud business to them. All of which means that margins should start to solidify and even creep up while churn may become lower. 

So that VAD distributor needs to get wise. And so do the vendors. End users will not appreciate having thousands of suppliers. It would be hell for consumers to have to buy their Apps individually from the myriad of software writers and the App market would never have taken off the way it has if that was the case. Apple changed the paradigm for us all in terms of online software hypermarkets and aggregated billings and, guess what, they make plenty of money out of it, far more than the average distributor does on software today.

So aggregation has an important and huge future and it is the one thing that may make those vendor executives regret their words about distributors. Meanwhile, distributors ought not to get over confident that just buying a platform will do the trick. There has to be a meeting of minds and the strategy must coincide with that of the vendors. That's going to take a while.

Why? Because many senior executives at vendors and channel alike simply don't get the Cloud yet.

Calx Europe is a Business Acceleration company specialising in helping vendors and channel develop and implement Cloud strategies. Call +44 (0) 207 193 2356 for a no obligation discussion about the Cloud and its future.