Cloud computing: Not pie in the sky, but big business
October 4, 2013
Grazed from TheDrum. Author: Tony Walford.
An M&A story I saw on The Drum earlier this week (Wednesday) really got me thinking about something – something someone said back in the 1990s, at the birth of the internet. This week’s story ran thus: Glasgow-based cloud computing specialists Iomart Group announced its acquisition of Backup Technology Ltd (BTL), a Leeds-based data recovery provider, for £23m (£19m in cash, £3.5m in shares).
But why does it matter to anyone else? Almost 20 years ago someone at Sun Microsystems – I can’t recall exactly who – said that the desktop PC was doomed, and that everyone would access files and programs through a “dumb” terminal. They wouldn’t need an expensive machine with a hard drive full of software; everything could be located on remote servers…
People (including myself) have been saying it ever since and many companies now run their systems on secure cloud-based platforms. Sun was absorbed in a $5.6bn deal by software giant Oracle in 2009, but back in the day it was one of Silicon Valley’s great innovators, in both hardware and software. Unix, Java, Virtualised computing, RISC processing and Network File System (NFS) are all Sun inventions…
Read more from the source @ http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2013/10/04/cloud-computing-not-pie-sky-big-business