Redefining the Cloud
Categorized: Industry News, Reports Back from Shows. Submitted by Ron on
I've been reflecting on some great conversations that took place about "the Cloud" at Autodesk University a few weeks back.
It's great to see "The Cloud" move from a proper noun to now encompassing one of two broad ideas: a) using nearly infinite compute power for certain intensive operations, or b) accessing certain data from any connected device. Clearly, it's not a panacea – and likely not even appropriate for many types of applications used in engineering. But for some tasks, like real-time simulation of multiple design iterations, it's extremely powerful. Being cloud-based doesn't necessarily mean zero software on the client, as is often assumed. As Carl Bass said, we're not talking about "no software" as Salesforce.com has advocated, but rather "software everywhere." I have seen cloud-based applications that may have limited software using the back-end power of cloud hardware, as well as full-fledged desktop applications turning to the cloud for certain computationally expensive operations. It also does not necessarily mean that your data is somewhere other than your local device all of the time. Slowly but surely, this is all getting less cloudy (pun intended) – for me, at least.