Cloud Computing - A Disruptive Force of Mobile Devices Industry

What do we know about the mobile devices industry?

We cannot emphasize the significance of mobile devices any more, for the revolutionary transformation they bring to us with the more retrievable information as well as the convenience in life ever existed in mankind history. Those technological advancements endow us with higher life qualities and boost the global consumption of mobile devices.


From the chart below, we can identify the continuous yet drastic growth in the global mobile devices shipments, specifically the contribution of smartphone shipments. It is recorded that in 2012, the shipments in millions of Desktop PC, Portable PC, Smartphone and Tablet are 148, 202, 722 and 128 respectively (Canalys, 2013). However, the shipment of Desktop PC is projected to decline to 143 million this year while that of the portable devices will increase and total at 1,741 million. The most important factor for the climb is the portability and convenience provided by the diverse functions and various applications equipped in the mobile devices, which come to gradually take the place of traditional electronic products such as the PCs (Maisto, 2014). Besides, the popularity of WiFi and 4G network as well as the booming of the application markets cater for the demand of working, studying or entertainment en route instead of sitting in front of the desktop computer all day.

Fig 1: Electronic Devices Shipments

Source from IDC

Nevertheless, the recent requirements for the mobile products are getting much higher that the mobile devices are requested to be accessed to data center and accomplish the computing via the Internet, even including the services like super computing. Cloud computing, in consequence, seizes the opportunity and disrupts the market, paving the way for a brand new era with the maximum use of the Internet.

Cloud computing – the disruptive force

According to the NIST, cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction (Mell, 2011).

Fig 2: Cloud Computing

Owing to the application of cloud computing technology and its service pattern on the portable electronic devices, the acquisition and utilization of IT application, products as well as services have been immensely facilitated. With merely a mobile device and the access to the Internet, a user can easily obtain the information pertaining to cloud computing service, computing resources, exploitation platform, etc.

As a matter of fact, the introduction of cloud computing has exerted enormous impacts on the costs of mobile devices for the innovative technology, to a great extent, declines the hardware and software requirements during the manufacturing process of the devices, notwithstanding the lacking of stability, timeliness and privacy in comparison with the conventional local computing algorithms.

In short, the constraints faced by the existing technology of the standard mobile devices are overcome with the help of cloud computing, particularly the obstacles of dealing with data storage and processing power. It succeeds in extending the devices’ battery by computationally executing the intensive applications via the cloud computing. In addition, ABI Research (2009) forecasts that “business productivity applications will soon dominate the mix of mobile Cloud applications, particularly collaborative document sharing, scheduling, and sale force management apps”. Thus, the mobile devices industry based on the cloud computing technology will soon dominate the market and become the development trend in the near future.

Features of mobile could computing

With the development of telecommunications technology, mobile cloud computing has been concerned to overcome the limitations of mobile devices. In the mobile cloud computing system, the entire data is sent from the mobile device to the cloud server, and the data is processed using powerful cloud server computing resources (Lee, 2013). After that, the mobile device obtains the processed data back from the cloud server, and all the processes are completed.

So far, cloud computing has been used to accelerate the existing process and reduce the cost of them in most cases. We are working in the so-called mobile and cloud era. Our thoughts are formed from several key factors: the need for a flexible IT infrastructure, big data analysis and the increased mobile use.

The case for mobile cloud computing can be required by considering the exclusive advantages of empowered mobile computing, and various potential mobile cloud applications have been identified in the literature. These applications are divided into a number of areas, such as natural language processing, image processing, sharing Internet access, the application of sensor data, sharing GPS, querying crowd computing and multimedia search (Sharma, 2013). However, as described, applications which involve distributed computing applications have certain common characteristics, such as consumption data with easy-to-see segment boundary, and the time re-assembled partial results into a complete one must be small.

The concept of ‘Bring Your Own Device' (BYOD) will continue to gain momentum, as more companies understand the benefits like cost savings and increased employee productivity. As mobile service and management are used in more and more enterprises, there will be a move toward cloud computing as organizations turning to IT assets from its own data center to the cloud. When they adopt cloud computing, companies will begin to organize their data in the cloud, even mission-critical workloads.

For example, Google Apps is one of the most advanced and comprehensive collaborative products. The program includes the application of e-mail, calendar, instant messaging, room reservation, document storage and editing video sharing (Xu, 2010). In addition to supporting the Python standard library, Google App Engine also supports Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for data storage, Google account, image processing, and e-mail services.

Cloud computing also has its limitations. A major problem faced by the adoption of cloud technology is the client's security challenges. User information of different services is stored in the cloud, which is susceptible to unauthorized access. This is required to provide identity management systems for authentication. In addition, the cloud needs to have a well-defined access control policy to determine and restrict access to authorized users only. ISP can be packaged services to create and deliver a combination of services to meet specific customer needs (Wattal, 2014).

Risk and Uncertainty

Questions that you should consider prior to choosing cloud service providers to develop  the business may be outlined as bellow:

Is this the pure core business cloud service provider? How financially stable is the provider?Whether the company will go bankrupt in the future.

Whether the  its data centers have implement data secure protection meet your legal, regulatory,privacy and business needs?

How long has the company been offering the service, is the company have enough experience in providing the cloud computing service and does it have a track record with verifiable customers? What is its level of technical expertise within its operations team? If the some technic problem emerge can the operating team efficiently handle it.

Cloud computing service can bring some risks and uncertainties to the company because some data exposed may lead to economic loss.

Cloud computing product life cycle - Cloud PLM Options

Once you make a decision to deploy PLM in your cloud management, the next step is to decide what Cloud PLM solutions will best suit your company.

There are two types of cloud strategies in PLM applications:

Public clouds are usually depends on who share the system, and there is a problem that a company who use the cloud computing services cannot control their follower users because the just use the public cloud.


Private clouds systems available for the sole benefit of a company or entity where cloud data is secure and protected but it may be expensive because now is the beginning session of cloud computing. 

Conclusion

Cloud-based PLM is still in the infant stage; even though the technology is matured but the product still needs time to be tested and completed. However, accessing data, processes, and business intelligence in the cloud from a PLM platform, if done correctly, could enable global companies to balance critical information sources, maximize expert resources, and manage complex analytics—all within their PLM system.

Technology of PLM on Cloud

Cloud technology, as applied to PLM applications, and its essential ingredients, primarily in hybrid cloud topology, is presented in the following charts. A viable cloud stack, especially those presented in the hybrid clouds, was defined as possible PLM cloud deployment alternatives.

Fig 3: Standard PLM Technology Stack

Microsoft with Cloud Computing

The Microsoft Corporation, known as the technology magnate, shows great interest in this emerging cloud computing technology as well. For the aspect of mobile devices, Microsoft embarked on expanding its products with Windows operating system, which was specially designed for the use of cloud computing. It provides a stable cloud-computing platform for users with cloud services, computation, data management, business analytics, mobile services and many others.

Microsoft manages to gain the benefits of Windows mobile products like Windows Phone and Microsoft Surface cost-effectively, realizes business agility. Generally speaking, many businesses have been facing the challenges with the IT expenditure involved. The more sophisticated the IT landscape is, the more investment will be required for getting the suitable IT infrastructure in place. Microsoft is looking for ways to reduce the total expenditure of ownership and change how they spend; in the meantime, it is also seeking for help that enables the organization to react faster towards customer demands. This means that Microsoft adopts the strategy to be more agile in innovating products and services and enhancing customer experience as a measure of market requests. In fact, Microsoft endeavors to convince the user accounts to migrate their applications to Windows on their mobile devices, which proves to be one of the most critical areas for the future of their cloud computing strategy. It boosts the competence of Windows operating system and will supply more new versions and many other related applications as it always does.

For example, the users adopt Windows Azure as part of the above cloud diffusion strategies promoted by Microsoft, for the simple reason that those core competencies impress and benefit them with the following factors.


(1) Speed to value: reduce deployment time by up to 70%

(2) Flexibility: scale infrastructure resources as needed
(3) Lower costs: achieve economy of scale and reduce capacity
(4) Security, reliability and compliance: ensure data protection and compliance
(5) Greener IT: reduce your carbon footprint through the cloud

Organizations prefer to take a step-wise migration to the cloud and exploit new applications first before they consider removing old legacy systems since radical innovation makes them more cautious, therefore, it will for sure take some time for them to adapt to the disruption.

According to Capgemini (2012), more than three-quarters of executives in the survey revealed that their company had a Cloud strategy in place (as figure), and Azure is an increasingly popular choice. It is evidently illustrate in the research that the diffusion of Windows Azure is quite successful. In other words, the strategic approach of Microsoft Corporation fits against its core competencies.

Fig 5: Window Azure Adoption

The features of strategic approach

Microsoft is a really interesting company in mobile cloud computing industry. Although there are so many barriers for Microsoft as a late entrant of cloud computing, the latest data of 2014 showed that the increasing rate of market share of Microsoft is far ahead compared to other competitors.

Microsoft’s cloud strategy is mobile first, cloud first, which is firstly proposed by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The strategy is aimed at developing a comprehensive suite of software that extensively uses cloud technology, and it is easily deployable on mobile devices. Additionally, the company continues to focus on the sale of devices such as tablets and smart phones to increase its revenues and market share in mobile devices vertically. It is also targeting at its Virtualization and Cloud platforms, respectively called Hyper-V and Azure, to leverage the fastest growing segments of its enterprise markets (Columbus, 2013).

To succeed in Windows Dynamics and Azure for Microsoft, the company needs to make each partner and reseller to believe in the cloud-first strategy. Then translate their unique expertise into sales (Columbus, 2013). That’s going to be a challenge for Microsoft to enhance its customer base. Consequently, Microsoft is promoting their Windows Azure Service Dashboard heavily here as a result.

For Microsoft, there is significant advantage and opportunity to conquer the mobile cloud industry with its large customer base of Windows operating system and Office series software. For example, Office365 will go to an accelerated release cycle. Microsoft combines the use of Office 365 with Microsoft Azure cloud storage. With Microsoft Azure, Office users can edit, save and load documents anywhere, any time, which significantly facilitates users’ working.

Besides Office 365, Microsoft intends to enlarge its cloud industry with its large product bases. Microsoft Azure’s storage part is inserted to Outlook, Xbox Live and Bing, which is called OneDrive. From a roadmap perspective, this will also force Microsoft to support many more mobile operating systems and environments than they ever had before.  In order to make their devices and services succeed, for example, they will have to support Google Android and Apple iOS device interfaces capable of integrating with SQL Server anyway. In addition, Microsoft Azure plays a really significant role in Windows operating system including Windows8, the latest Windows 10, and mobile operating system Windows Phone. All these features offer Microsoft many future opportunities and make Microsoft a strong competitor in Mobile cloud industry.

The Cloud market is still potential in the future, cloud applications will account for 90% of total mobile data traffic by 2018, compared to 82% at the end of 2013. Mobile cloud traffic will grow 12-fold from 2013 to 2018, attaining a compound annual growth rate of 64% (Sieber, 2015). Hence, to integrate cloud market with varies of different products is the inevitable trend.

Today’s cloud technology has been utilized in many areas to enhance the ability to achieve business goals:


(1)       Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS)

(2)       Private cloud and hybrid cloud
(3)       Test and development
(4)       Big data analytics
(5)       File storage
(6)       Disaster recovery
(7)       Backup

For Microsoft Azure, the nearest trend should be changes for Windows 10. It’s evolving into a central sync and storage hub that works across apps, devices, and platforms. Windows 10 will take things to the next level, and be able to do more with Microsoft Azure than on any other platform.

Microsoft Azure’s backend will be unified

The Microsoft Azure backend is a little complicated right now. Behind the scenes, it is realized by three different sync engines; One for Windows 7/8/Mac use, second one is for Microsoft Azure for business and a third one for Windows 8.1 because it introduces a novel placeholder feature, known as “smart files.” With Windows 10, Microsoft is trying to converge the engines to a single sync engine.
Windows 10 makes Microsoft Azure more flexible and user friendly for the placeholders are replaced by selective sync. Microsoft Azure supports remote access. If you check “Let me use Microsoft Azure to fetch any of my files on this PC”, you can access your files remotely, i.e. from another computer via the Microsoft Azure website. When you enable this option, the connected PC will show up on the Microsoft Azure web interface. If the computer is turned on and connected to the Internet, you can access any of its folders and files.

Microsoft Azure integrates with Cortana & Universal Apps

Cortana, Microsoft’s digital personal assistant is just like Siri to Apple. She is able to answer questions whenever you select “Search my stuff”, she can also search all your files, including the ones stored on Microsoft Azure’s storage aspects. You can then access those files from search results. Thankfully, Cortana responds both to voice control and to keyboard inputs into the search box located in the taskbar, yet of course, the functions of Cortana is still being enhanced.

These features are only a little part of Microsoft’s recent strategy for cloud computing. Actually, it has been proved that the company’s final aim is to realize the concept of Internet of Things(IoT). The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical objects or "things" embedded with electronics, software, sensors and connectivity to enable it to achieve greater value and service by exchanging data with the manufacturer, operator and/or other connected devices (Wikipedia). Each thing is uniquely identifiable through its embedded computing system but is able to interoperate within the existing Internet infrastructure. There is no denying that the appearance of cloud computation technique makes it no more a concept but a real future direction.

Reference:

1. Canalys. “Mobile device market to reach 2.6 billion units by 2016 - Smart phones and tablet PCs will continue to impact shipments of other phones and notebook PCs”. Feb. 2013. Retrieved from: http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/mobile-device-market-reach-26-billion-units-2016 

2. Maisto, Michelle. “Mobile Device Shipments to Reach 2.5 Billion Units in 2014: Gartner”. Mar. 2014. Retrieved from: http://www.eweek.com/mobile/mobile-device-shipments-to-reach-2.5-billion-units-in-2014-gartner.html 

3. Mell, Peter. Grance, Timothy. “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing”. Sep. 2011. National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication 800-145. Retrieved from: http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf

4. ABI Research. (2009). “Mobile Cloud computing subscribers to total nearly one billion by 2014”. May 2011. Retrieved from: http://www.abiresearch.com/press/1484-Mobile+Cloud+Computing+Subscribers+to+Total+Nearly+One+Billion+b y+2014

5. Woonghee Lee; Jongtack Jung ; Hwangnam Kim, Analyzing Extent and Influence of Mobile Device’s Participation in Mobile Cloud Computing, ICT Convergence (ICTC), 2013, Page(s): 767-772

6. Sharma, R.; Kumar, S.; Trivedi, M.C., Mobile Cloud Computing: A Needed Shift from Cloud to Mobile Cloud, Computational Intelligence and Communication Networks (CICN), 2013, Page(s): 536-539

7. Dong Xu, Cloud Computing: An emerging technology, Computer Design and Applications (ICCDA), 2010, Page(s): V1-100- V1-104

8. Wattal, S.; Kumar, A., Issues and Challenges in Intelligent Computing Techniques (ICICT), 2014, Page(s): 168-173

9. Parihar, Awadhesh Singh. “PLM and Cloud Computing”. 2012. Retrieved from: http://www.infosys.com/engineering-services/features-opinions/Documents/social-plm.pdf  

10. Capgemini. “A Close-up View of Microsoft Azure Adoption.” 2012. Retrieved from: https://www.de.capgemini.com/resource-file-access/resource/pdf/a_close-up_view_of_microsoft_azure_adoption_business_decision-makers_are_driving_cloud_trends.pdf

11. Columbus, Louis.(2013), “Microsoft's Cloud Computing Strategy and Roadmap Evident at Convergence 2013.” 2013. Retrieved from: http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2013/03/19/microsofts-cloud-strategy-and-roadmap-evident-at-convergence-2013/

12. Sieber, Tina. “Roundup Of Cloud Computing Forecasts And Market Estimates, 2014”. 2015. “This is how OneDrive works in Windows 10”.

13. Wikipedia. Retrieved from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things
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15.Cloud-Based Computing for Product Lifecycle Management.

Posted in Medical Cloud Computing by Jamie Hartford on June 7, 2012 from http://www.mddionline.com/article/cloud-based-computing-product-lifecycle-management