Mobile’s future is in the cloud

As adoption and usage of mobile applications has soared — thanks to the direct and indirect impact of Apple’s App Store — there has been renewed interest in how a wealth of rich media applications can be delivered to, and run on, mass-market handsets. Increasingly, opearting system providers are coming to the conclusion that cloud computing — wherein the majority of app information is hosted and processed in the cloud — provides not only the optimal solution to this problem, but also offers the potential to enable collaborative, converged apps across both consumer and enterprise services. This was clear at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, as a host of major players — including Google, Motorola and Sony Ericsso — unveiled cloud-based platforms and services for mobile devices.

While it is unclear precisely when the term “cloud computing” was coined, or by whom, it refers to the use of the Internet (often depicted as a cloud in network diagrams) and attendant infrastructure as a location wherein application data is stored. The definition of cloud computing is — as perhaps befits the term — rather nebulous and imprecise. Even Simone Brunozzi, Amazon’s “Web Services Evangelist,” eschews definition, referring only to terms that can be associated with the technology: on-demand, scalable and pay-per-use.

What cloud computing does is facilitate the delivery of software applications from a centrally hosted computing facility to end users through a browser. It offer resources as a service, rather than a product, to end users. These services are provided on an as-needed basis and a pay-per-use basis. This model has a number of specific advantages for both public consumers and enterprise customers:

• Public consumers: offers Web-based applications across a wide variety of handsets.
• Enterprise customers: offers greater potential for collaborative applications along with the opportunity to reduce capex costs. Indeed capex can then be transferred to opex, allowing enterprises to focus on app development rather than on data hosting and storage.

The following resources are those that are typically offered within cloud as a service:

• Software: Under the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, a software provider will licence an application to customers for use as a service on demand.
• Platform: These are platform facilitates applications being run within the cloud. The platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model is based on the delivery of a computing platform together with attendant solution stack. It enables client to deploy cloud-based apps without having to manage the platform themselves. (Note: There is often a substantial overlap between the SaaS and PaaS solutions.)
• Infrastructure: Under this model, computing and data storage resources are packaged as a metered service.

Essentially, cloud offers businesses the opportunity to outsource IT solutions and infrastructure, data storage and — if required — application management to a remote third party, costed on a scalable, pay-per-use basis. In the first instance, this obviates any need for substantive capex on in-house IT solutions; in the second, the flexibility provided by a pay-per-use basis means that IT opex will be scaled to suit the precise needs of the company.

While cloud computing per se is a comparatively recent development, there are a number of key drivers and enablers that are facilitating the deployment, launch and adoption of mobile cloud services, and some of these are outlined in the table below.

Table: Key drivers of mobile cloud computing

Driver Why does it benefit the mobile cloud?

Launch of HTML5 HTML5 will reduce the dependence of end users on plug-in app technologies, including Java, Flash and Silverlight. It facilitates this through an offline mode, offering offline Web application caches so customers can still use pages even when the Internet connection is lost. Data cached locally will load faster; furthermore, when the end user loads a page with cached elements, the browser will only download data that has been updated, thereby reducing the load on the server. From a mobile cloud perspective, HTML5 could be a critical development, given the fact that connectivity is (and will continue to be) poor in certain locales, whether due to insufficient network coverage or topographical issues. The cloud provides greater processing power than the handset If a feature-phone is required to perform all of the processing a particular app requires, it may struggle as individual apps become larger and more plentiful. There is a growing body of opinion that suggests that rather than have consumers download thick clients to the handset, the optimal model would be to download thin clients, with the majority of the processing conducted within the cloud. Cloud is multiplatform ... For an application developer, one of the key historical constraints from a cost perspective has been the need to port apps across multiple platforms. Cloud obviates this issue. … and apps/content is portable Historically, when consumers have upgraded to a new handset, they have been unable to take their applications with them. However, under the cloud-based approach, as all of the data pertaining to a given app is stored in the cloud, this means that end users will not lose this data when they switch from one device to another. Cloud enables enterprise mobility The cloud enables collaborative apps to be available 24/7, at any location.

Source: Juniper Research

Over the next few years, the way in which mobile applications are accessed, processed and delivered will undergo a revolution. Mobile has become the latest battleground in which a struggle for supremacy is being, and will increasingly be, played out among a number of non-traditional players (Apple, Google, Microsoft), while traditional players, anxious to maintain revenues in the face of this new competition for customers, are looking to new business models and means of delivering services. For all parties, cloud is becoming the weapon of choice in this highly competitive field.