TQ #10

Open source technologies are revolutionizing the world of software marketing. For a long time, companies like Microsoft have maintained a monopoly in the software industry, making it hard for the great masses to gain access to the same type of tools that the majority of the world is using. Fortunately, several important institutions, governments (i.e. Brazil) and schools around the globe have firmly opted for venturing into the use of open source applications. This way they look for opportunities to cut their capital costs and be able to spend their money wisely in acquiring services for efficient access to data, software applications and computing processing power from a cloud of online resources.

In cloud computing allows users to access their data or applications from any device connected to the Internet. In Cloud Computing there are two major services, SaaS (Software as a Service) and HaaS (Hardware as a Service). In the first case, SaaS applications or tools will be available for companies to work on project management (Clarizen), customer relationship management (Saleforce.com), or human resources applications. End users like students and workers can take advantage of office applications like WebAware, Google Docs, Blist or SlideRocket to create or load documents into their online cloud and work collaboratively on them with any PC with Internet access. On the other hand, Cloud Computing provides HaaS. In this case, computing capacity is purchased under the web. Amazon is currently allowing users to purchase computer processing power online through the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Google is doing the same with their Google App Engine, allowing users to run web applications on Google infrastructure. In this manner, HaaS allows any individual or organization to increase or decrease their hardware requirements within minutes. Cloud Computing is a trend that has been compared to the electricity network a century ago. At that time, companies stopped producing their own power, and instead plugged in to a National Electricity grid. In the same way, individuals and organizations can now connect to a cloud of computing resources to "fuel" their information activities, rather than having to install software on their own hardware. Unquestionably, I will support the inclusion of Cloud Computing both for SaaS and HaaS in schools. Money is a crucial issue when it comes to implementing good educational solutions. Computing software and hardware need not be tied up to the institution anymore. We have to support this new revolution of ubiquitous access to information and resources from anywhere in the world.

Apart from Amazon and Google, Microsoft has now introduced Windows Azure, their first Cloud Computing Operating System and set of associated services. Interestingly, it is DELL, the company selected by Microsoft, which provides servers and storage nodes that actually power Azure, running in Microsoft data centers. However, Azure, in its conception, has been created to to allow developers who are used to writing for the Windows environment, to quickly take their applications and cloud-enable them, i.e. allow them to be deployed in the Windows Azure cloud. It is a way of lowering the barriers to writing and deploying computing services. This is an approach that I would definitely not consider for a school. The idea is to break this dependency from Microsoft and not get locked into something really proprietary. On the long run, it always become a non-standard and it is difficult to switch between computers.

The last issue I wanted to deal with is the use of Teleconferencing. This is definitely something that we are rapidly moving to as new applications are enabled for people to use in their jobs or at home. Telepresence has been designed by Cisco and they are very humble in just stating that they have just invented a "giant phone" (the size of a room). This technology uses the same IP communication that Cisco has been selling for almost 7 years. It is just a big Voice Over IP system where video has been added. It is a powerful communication tool that allows features such as body language and persuasion to appear naturally evident. The enhanced video perspective really gives the impression that the people are face to face and sitting in the same room. However, this technology is still expensive for many schools. The other option is to go for cheaper access to Videoconferencing. There are many alternatives for Flash based application running within a browser that makes use of dedicated proprietary load-balanced servers. Mebeam.com is a really easy to use application in which you literally have "nothing" to install. I will definitely support the wide use of web based teleconferencing in schools. In addition, I would recommend the purchase of suitable equipment to allow conversations to be seen and heard in a very natural way by all in a room. If the school were a wealthy one, I would certainly recommend Cisco's Telepresence.

In summary, all these technologies have the potential to change the face of the entire computing industry and revolutionize the way we interact with each other. There are still issues that need to be considered with respect to limitations on computing power such as bandwidth and reliability of network services. These issues will tend to be resolved as people consider to join the gigantic Cloud of a Global Computer.