Clouds, Smartphones and Rainmaking !!

We discussed Cloud Computing in my previous post and its potential from the network operators point of view on how they can leverage farming their servers. We will extend our discussion to the true potential and possible use-cases/applications for cloud computing  from mobile device manufacturer, application developer, mobile web and mobile user’s point of view.

Reiterating the fact that the smartphone is fueling the mobile phone industry growth and at the same time is on the path to become an integral part of user’s life in connecting him with people, information and the world. Also, with the sea of hardware, software and service enablers for the smartphones, it is projected to be the unified device which will not only have use cases of phone or a laptop but a potential gadget  equipped with gaming, social networking, photography, health, banking & payments, learning, productivity and other unlimited  applications and tools. With all these applications and use cases it also strives to provide the best and the most compelling user experience.

But to unify all this into a single device is challenging, considering the processing power, form factor, hardware design, software compatibility and network interoperability limitations. So is it possible to eliminate some of these limitations using clouds ?? Looking at the potential and recent success of cloud computing from technical and business perspective, the answer is yes and in a big way. Mobile Cloud Computing will definitely leverage the mobile handsets to the level of Super Duper Smart with no foggy future ahead.

Device Manufacturers & Clouds

Firstly, considering the primary supplier for device manufacturers the semiconductor industry, there has been a continuing and commendable effort in reducing the chipsets size and at the same time ramping up the peak processing performance and reducing the power consumption. This effort has led to some of the most sleeker and powerful phones out there. Apple A4, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, Nvidia’s Tegra, Intel Atom, TI OMAP series integrating the compact ARM architecture design have revolutionized the mobile phone industry with the likes of iPhones, iPad, netbooks and other cool class of smartphones devices. The never ending strife for increasing mobile processing power with users becoming more and more data hungry and networks transitioning from 3rd generation to 4th generation to accommodate this tsunami of data, clouds can be the best possible solution to take of the bulk of the processing power. In short you outsource the processing power to the clouds..which gives rise to the concept of Cloud Phones and we all now can understand the benefit it might provide to our devices. For ex: Apple spent a billion dollar in building  the A4 processor for its mobile devices, imagine instead finding a solution to harness the power of servers  which proves to be definitely cheaper and highly scalable.

Secondly, the software platforms(operating systems) suppliers or those with in-house development have started realizing the benefits of cloud computing especially with its faster provisioning times, supreme processing power, cost effectiveness in enabling a faster time to market and viable business and feasible technical solution. This is from both development as well as testing perspectives.

Mobile Application Developers & Clouds

Mobile Application developers have already realized the power, cost efficiency of cloud computing and are already using clouds  as “PaaS”- platform as a service to build their applications for Android, iPhones, Facebook,etc really fast with provisioning cycles down from days to minutes.  There are various cloud service providers as Amazon SimpleDB storing accessible data on Amazon clouds, Rackspace, HP, Microsot Azure, Google App Engine, IBM, Force.com lending the cloud power in different utility models as Software as a Service, Platform as a Service,  Infrastructure as a Service for enterprises. Clouds is going to be the differentiating factor for the enterprise mobility solutions in implementing various CRM, ERP,SAP solutions with huge databases which requires higher processing power, better efficiency, response time and  at the same time drive down the deployment costs. The best example is “Salesforce.com” solution which is successfully driven by clouds.

Mobile Phone Users & Clouds

Also, considering from the user’s perspective, if instead of 8GB/16GB phones imagine the phone storing all your data and installed applications in the clouds, then the phones will be less bulkier and with unlimited storage place available at dirt cheap price. Also in future you will see the concept of buying a personal “private” cloud which you yourself can manage and will be no managed by third parties(which you don’t trust). Cloud Computing in mobile holds massive potential with stronger and diverse use cases for the users too. There are other different use cases which we can summarize at this point apart from the data storage:

Remote Access: Access your applications, data anytime from anywhere  even if you lose your device.

mHealth: Health monitoring, real time tracking, data and health records access at ubiquity

mBanking: Access your bank accounts with real time transactions, payments, transfers with single click using cell phones

Social networking  & Widgets: All your personal info, different social networking accounts, pictures, videos, articles, blogs, messages, microblogs ,tweets everything managed on the cloud and with real time faster access and almost at no cost.

Games: The biggest and most popular use case will be games with no need to install it on the phone and the processing done by clouds at a higher speed enabling a breathtaking gaming experience without any glitches or interruptions or processing power limitations.

Clouds & Challenges

The biggest challenges in embracing cloud computing by mobile industry value chain are,

• The cloud computing is in nascent stages and considered a less mature solution at this point of time
• Low confidence in cloud computing’s current data security, privacy , authentication and authorization scenarios
• For device manufacturers to achieve the ROI from their previous and existing investments in the hardware and software design and development infrastructure will also be the primary reason to keep cloud computing at a distance for now
• API standardization is another major hurdle from application development point of view.HTML5, One API, BONDI and other such evolving standards might make things easier for mobile computing to take-off

Mobile Clouds Vendors and Business Models

There are different vendors to watch out for in mobile cloud computing arena, Nuance Communications, Soonr, Google, Opera Software, Upvise, Gogobeans, Microsoft, Bitstream,etc using the power of clouds and fitting them into profitable business models. The different business models we can witness will be extending the device based App Store model to the Web based App Store model- selling apps and services which will be more web-cloud based, we might also see business models based on standardized APIs, different partnership models with the cloud space owners and with a plethora of different billing and bundling schemes in the value chain based on three primary revenue enablers >>

Content/Apps, Selling Cloud Space and Processing Power.