Thursday 29 July 2010
When online business applications were first introduced, there was a dismissive air as to how much use accounting professionals would glean from them. Finally, ten years later, a white paper finds that it is set to become a £10bn industry, and acceptance from businesses is imminent. Using online applications, or cloud computing as it is more commonly known, has recently hit the headlines as traditional software providers toy with the idea of entering the market, while businesses appear firmly divided on whether or not it will prove to be an advantage or an unnecessary risk to their company. The latest white paper, The development of web-based acccounting by Aqilla, shows that online software is continuing to grow, highlighting IT analysts Gartner’s prediction that in the next 12 months we are likely to see a spike in the industry with the market expanding by two thirds to $16bn (£9.6bn) by 2013.
Around four-fifths of finance professionals use web-based applications at work, with a third using HMRC’s online tax return function. Benefits include simplified contracts, low cost of deployment and usually a more intuitive interface to work with. Although in every advancement of the software industry there are the pros and cons, such as those that questions its large scale use for big business, there is usually a step change in take-up when a big player emerges to give the much-debated technology its backing. As one of the biggest telecom brands in the world, BT might make the SME business market sit up and take notice. BT recently signed a deal with Xero, the online accountancy software providers, to supply its products to their SME customers. BT will offer all the support, maintenance and integration as part of the deal. ‘We’re serious about the cloud, and we don’t just attribute our brand to anything willy nilly,’ says Chris Lindsay, general manager for broadband and software for businesses at BT.
Cloud computing provides users with more security than traditional IT applications, one computer expert has claimed. Eran Feigenbaum, director of security for Google Apps, made the comments during a visit to the UK. He said that many organisations are concerned about losing data and adopting cloud computing means this is less likely as storage is in the cloud rather than a hard device such as a USB or the memory of a laptop. ‘Data is typically lost when laptops and USB memory sticks are lost or stolen, but local storage is no longer necessary if a company uses cloud-based apps,’ he told ComputingWeekly.com. Mr Feigenbaum added: ‘Statistics show that 66 per cent of USB sticks are lost and around 60 per cent of those lost contain commercial data.’Using the cloud reduces the chances of the data being lost as it does not need to be taken anywhere, the computing expert concluded. BT announced it is to work with Microsoft to offer its business customers access to cloud computing.
BT is about to formally launch a virtualised infrastructure service called BT Virtual Data Centre, which will form the basis of its cloud-computing strategy. ”VDC is the basis of our cloud-computing offering,” Neil Sutton, BT Global Services’ product chief, told silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK on Thursday. “We’ve begun to deliver communications-as-a-service and hosted services for voice, unified communications and CRM, and we see a roadmap where people want to be able to provision an infrastructure end-to-end. We want to deliver those things as a service in a predictable and flexible manner.” VDC involves the virtualisation of servers, storage, networks and security delivered to customers via an online portal as cloud-based services. On Thursday, BT’s Global Services division announced the customer rollout of VDC, which will initially target multinational corporate customers and the public sector.
BT Global Services’ product chief, told silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK on Thursday. “We’ve begun to deliver communications-as-a-service and hosted services for voice, unified communications and CRM, and we see a roadmap where people want to be able to provision an infrastructure end-to-end. We want to deliver those things as a service in a predictable and flexible manner.” The company has been using VDC internally since early last year to cut costs within Global Services, and has been trialling it with selected customers over recent months.
Morrison pointed out that BT was not the first to go down the cloud infrastructure route—he highlighted analogous services from AT&T (T), Verizon (VZ), Savvis and Rackspace—but suggested that the decision to first mature the technology in-house would work to BT’s advantage. “Today, if you buy a hosted service from BT, you’re buying a BT MPLS network, connected into a BT datacentre, with servers which BT will supply and manage on your behalf,” Morrison said. BT’s real interest is in the service layer on the top. So it has to create an architecture that allows it to deliver that service layer effectively, without necessarily owning all of the bits that sit underneath—and not have an architecture that is based on a BT-specific design set to make it all work.”
