Voices.com is a technology-based business with hardly any computers.
David Ciccarelli and his wife, Stephanie, set up the London, Ont., firm in 2004 to connect voiceover artists with companies seeking their services. The company's website — www.voices.com — has thousands of audio samples, along with job listings.
The site runs on servers hosted by Rackspace U.S. Inc., a Texas company, and its thousands of audio files are stored on Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service (S3). And Voices uses Salesforce.com — a customer relationship management system that runs on the Web — to manage its sales and marketing efforts.
Mr. Ciccarelli says relying heavily on outside computing power — the company has Apple Macintosh desktop computers, but no servers — saves money and eliminates the hassle of maintaining its own systems.
"For small businesses," he says, "it's the perfect solution."
Voices.com is using cloud computing. The term originates from a visual cue that people in the computer business have used for years when making slides for presentations — whenever they needed to represent a large network, they drew a cloud. When your computing work is done "in the cloud" instead of on a specific computer in your own office or data centre, that's cloud computing.
John Sloan, an analyst at Info-Tech Research Group in London, Ont., says cloud computing uses "abstracted computing resources." With cloud computing, you can't point to the specific computer doing the work.
Software as a service (SaaS), exemplified by such applications as Salesforce.com, is the most common form of cloud computing today.
"Small and medium businesses have really found technology hard to manage," says Renny Monaghan, vice-president of industry solutions at Salesforce.com. SaaS has taken off because it frees customers from managing their own systems, he says.
But cloud computing can take other forms, such as running your own software on remote machines. That's infrastructure as a service. You develop your own application, then run it on infrastructure provided by someone else — Amazon, for instance, whose Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a prominent infrastructure-as-a-service provider. Others include GoGrid, operated by ServePath Dedicated Hosting in San Francisco, and Rackspace.
Infrastructure as a service is good for those who know how to manage it, but the raw computing power these services offer is a bit like 1,000 labourers showing up on Saturday morning to fix up your garden, argues Michael Crandell, chief executive and founder of Santa Barbara, Calif.-based RightScale Inc. You need help managing them.
RightScale is a platform-as-a-service company. It provides tools to manage infrastructure provided by such companies as Amazon and GoGrid, along with database software and other building blocks on which customers can build their own software.
Mr. Crandell says cloud computing is popular for Web-based systems serving the public, such as Voices.com, because it provides capacity as needed.
Paying for what you use rather than having to install enough capacity to support peak requirements is one big argument for cloud computing, he says. Others include eliminating the need for in-house technical expertise and replacing upfront capital expenditure for computer hardware with operating costs spread over time.
One pitfall is security. Large cloud-computing providers should have the resources to provide better security than most small businesses can, but the onus is on the customer to make sure they do. Mark Mayo, vice-president of engineering at Joyent Inc., a Sausalito, Calif., cloud computing provider, says customers should push their providers for information about how they secure their systems, and take the precaution of encrypting their data.
The good news, Mr. Mayo says, is that cloud computing may save businesses even more in the future. Such providers as Amazon are making sizable profits, he said at the recent IT360 conference in Toronto, and competition will force prices down.
"The cost of the cloud right now is cheap," he says. "The cost by the end of this year is going to be massively cheap."
