Identity Management Blog | Symplified

Cloud Computing - Catalyst for Change

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May 2009

Most of us remember when Sun announced "The Network Is the Computer" back in 2003. It's certainly not the first time we've heard similar things but there is truly a transformation under foot these last few years. Cloud Computing in particular is catalyzing change. For me, it's all about the network effect. Although this popular buzzword means a lot of different things to different people, I think of it as a generalization of Metcalf's Law--namely that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes in the network. As the number of people--and services--on the Internet grows, its importance grows at an ever increasing rate.
 
My own exposure to this kind of geometric growth goes back to the early 90s, coding document conversion modules for a startup in Scottsdale, Arizona. We created technology to convert documents between such classics as WordStar, MS Word (Windows and before), WordPerfect, PageMaker, and dozens of others. The business model was remarkable and we earned a spot in the Inc. 500 a few years in a row for rapid growth. Every time a customer came to us with a request to support document conversion of their own format we would realize royalties for licensing to them. Then we would add the new capability to our own consumer products, making them more valuable. And then we could license the new conversion capability to everyone else who had an interest in it. For our customers in the business of creating word processing apps (as they were called back then), this was often a way to enhance their own market share by readily allowing users to migrate existing docs into their own apps. Interestingly, when we added the document formats to our licensed offering, everyone, including our latest customer's competitors, could reap the benefit of the additional document conversion capability. We helped level the playing field in the emergent "office productivity tools" space. (I might add that the biggest players in this space came to us to reverse engineer and write "converters" between different versions of their own products. Figure that!)
 
So, I got a lot more than just good programming chops out of the document conversion gig--I learned an important lesson about marketing and something very similar to today's Network Effect. The key to low cost development of new document conversion modules was a hub and spoke model that used a generic format that any document could be converted to or from. (This all predated XML and standards like OpenDoc. As a historical side note, I did get to work with the Xerox Star system.)
 
In Cloud Computing, the ability to collaborate and exchange data with other Cloud Partners is key. This is analogous to my experience in converting data formats—only instead of pushing data from one format to another, we are pushing data from one partner to another. The Cloud Network Effect ensures that the value of using Cloud technology increases with each new partner. For Identity Management, it’s all about the value of a one-to-many model over a one-to-one model: identity assertions from one party can be carried to many other parties and enable Single Sign-On. Adopting technology that provides the benefit of connecting to all of the other adopters (the “many”) has obvious benefit over integrating individually with a one-to-one (point to point) approach. Would you rather do integration (e.g., federation) with each partner as a whole new exercise for each one or would you rather integrate once and get the benefit of the existing integrations already available?

Coby Royer, Technical Product Director

Symplified | The Cloud Security Company