HP on the convergence of the cloud and the mobile 30
Thu, 23 Sep 2010 2:15 pm EDT 
Patrick Scaglia, CTO of Cloud Services & Applications at HP, recently penned an editorial for Forbes on the future of cloud services and mobile computing, and it’s a good read. While Scaglia never mentions webOS by name, it’s clear what he’s talking about: as mobile bandwidth and power increases, so will the capabilities of devices augmented by cloud-based computing services.
While Scaglia speaks at length about the future of cloud services as they could pertain to corporations (this is for Forbes, after all), he does dabble in where the cloud could directly benefit the consumer, and that’s in the developing world. As he notes, despite the more than one billion persons living in India, only 80 million own computers that are connected to the internet. Yet, there are more than 600 million cell phones in use in India. The power of a smartphone, no matter how advanced, will always fall behind that of a desktop, if merely due to the size and power needs of components. But by utilizing cloud services, Scaglia argues that mobile devices could become the only devices needed: “As those phones become more sophisticated, connected and are backed by the cloud, that disparity will be wiped away.”
Quite rightly, Scaglia and HP see information as the most valuable resource of the 21st century. With HP’s recent purchase of firms like 3PAR and Stratavia, it’s good to know that they’re backing up their words with dollars. And let’s not forget about the cloud potential of webOS. Between Palm Profile backups and the Synergy combinations of tasks, calendars, and contacts, there’s a lot of cloud already baked into webOS, with potential for much more.
Source: Forbes
30 Comments
happy little clouds..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHixChYgGRI
Did you catch the video demonstrating how HPalm is going to create those happy little clouds?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raXanYjTF18
Old school!
I like the cloud capabilities of WebOS. The only problem is it needs a better ability to get all of that data in sync. For instance if I have a contact in my Yahoo contacts and my Exchange contacts it would be great if the phone could be the conduit to keep the two in sync rather than being just an aggregator.
That maybe something worth proposing for patching. Something like expand syncing of contact changes to all contact list or set number of contact lists instead of just to the default contact list.
This site should change its name to HPCentral.
I was just thinking about that. WebOS is sleeping in la la land until 2.0 eastern OS time.
I'm voting for Cloud|Central
It's good to know Palm was bought by the right company. Hopefully they will keep their inovative ways, while making more business like devices.
A smartphone tells people a lot about what kind of person you are. This is why I won't get the iPhone 4. I want a killer power user type device with a killer huge screen and stylus from HP, whith the elegance of webOS. Give me international support as well.
Perhaps after 6 years (sometime in 2011) I will finally have my TX replacement. In the meantime, it's iPod Touch 4G for me.
say what you want about the iphone, but it's an amazing and innovative phone and is still the most elegant on the market. And unlike our beloved Palm, they give their users new hardware every year and well as the largest app library on the market. I only wish Palm "cared" for it's users as much as Palm does.
susa> I only wish Palm "cared" for it's users as much as Palm does.
PreDogs, I missed you! Mom let you come out the basement huh? D.F.T.T......Don't Feed The Trolls ;)
I know you missed me. Your mom is not allowing visitors to your basement now.
Your absence at special school is apparent in your posts too.
>>A smartphone tells people a lot about what kind of person you are.
Did you really type that with a straight face?
I hate to break it to you, bub, but unless you are the kind of person who defines yourself by your possessions, your phone says NOTHING about you.
(And those who still use the Sprint Pre should be glad about that fact....)
I don't share the infatuation that some people have for cloud computing, at least as it applies to smartphones and tablets.
Even in a major city like Chicago a good 3G/4G/wifi signal is not always available. All the cloud storage and apps in the world are worthless if you can't get a good speedy internet connection. On a mobil device like my Pre, cloud storage is no substitute for and SD memory slot.
Hear, hear!
I don't know why I still cling to the false hope that HP wakes up some day and figures out what makes the difference between vibrant mobile OS ecosystem and a dead meat...
Certainly, that kind of CEO-gobbledygook does not help.
Anytime I hear words like "convergence" "cloud computing" and "potential" in one sentence, I know we have a problem. With speaker's sanity.
I like to have access to my data. Everytime and not when I have a connection available...the cloud is good for exchange. Nothing else to me. Sync all the contacts over all possible plattforms -> Google.
It's still *painfully* obvious that the populous at large is still confused as to the nature of "cloud computing". Let me break it down in simple terms.
Data LIVES on your DEVICE and is transferred TO and FROM the "cloud service" instead of to a local machine. Your Exchange mail from work LIVES on your device once it "SYNCS" with the server without needing to be in the office and CONNECT *physically* to anything.
It's NOT a "live stream" like a youtube video, it's "data as an app" meaning it is downloaded and interacted with locally on the mobile device. Once you sync, you can jump down a mine shaft and be fine using the synced data with changes being uploaded again once you are online.
yeah, right. Go and tell this to any of the TODO list application developers who work on WebOS apps, or maybe to Google Maps folks, or...
Whatever...
Never used the ToDo app but the webOS version of Google Maps is actually a WebApp. (which is one reason why it sucks b*lls)
snapfish is owned by hp (the company that planned and bought palm months ago). this is the mobile software currently offered by snapfish:
http://www.snapfish.com/snapfish/infosnapfishmobile
"While Scaglia never mentions webOS by name, it
what a bunch of CEO blabber, man... I am working for big boys all my life, and hear this kind of a nonsense every quarterly meeting. I tell you one thing, it means absolutely ZIP.
I concur!
webOS = client side cloud services. It does this because 1) it's not being done in the cloud right now and 2) business is lagging consumer in being able to migrate from client-server to web enabled to cloud fast enough.
Quote: "Quite rightly, Scaglia and HP see information as the most valuable resource of the 21st century."
O.K., I love my Pre and my gadgets as much as any lucky person in a developed country, but I suspect we show our naivete and blindness born of a privileged existence when we say things like that....
Would "water" and "food" not top information as the most valuable resource?! If not, why not?
Further, do all of those 600 mil. cell phone users in the mostly poverty stricken country of India have or need a high-falutin' smartphone?! I really don't think so, but maybe I'm missing something. I'm thinking of my brother who has spent much of his adult life traveling the world and who just returned from 6 years on Africa; I'm sure he would assure us that, yes, many people of limited means in the Third World use cell phones, but they have no use for "the cloud" the way it's being worshiped by us smartphone lovers. I just want to propose that we keep some perspective and stay grounded to balance our passion for technology.
To bad with these new data plans comming out, noboy will be able to afford to use it. At&T and Verizon are trying to kill all these type of services or at the very least trying to make big money off of it.
It's odd to see HP willing to own the fixed cost part (cloud servers and switches), but it is the carriers that foot the bill for the variable part (broad band) and will surely pass it on to us when it snowballs out of control.
Makes me wonder if down the road, companies like HP will buy a wireless provider as further integration and economy?
Either that or wireless carriers start to realize the importance of improving their infrastructure so their towers can handle the increased traffic that high-end devices and cloud computing are bringing. Take a bigger chunk of those profits, build more towers, spend money on R&D to improve/increase bandwidth, and start thinking towards the future.
Seriously, what's the point of having a super-fast device with amazing multimedia capabilities if your wireless carrier doesn't have the infrastructure to support it?
I think they are mainly concerned with the abusers. I had a rep at Sprint look at my usage and said I was about 10x the average user for data. I was commuting about 3 hours a day on a train at the time and was slinging, cough-cough-cough.netting or running an IRC client full time. I told him I guess he considered me an abuser, and he said not at all. Abusers started at about 5x's what I was using. They look at the worst offenders and see how many average users they could add in their place, without expanding their hardware.
But yes, the future is streaming data so they will continue to expand their stuff and not raise rates very high, the market will dictate that. But they are definitely looking to reign in the abusers without ruffling too many feathers.