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"Ultimately, cloud computing will be as disruptive and have as big of an impact as the Internet did in the 1990s," says Ian Howells, CMO of Alfresco, in this podcast interview we recently recorded.

Listen to Howells discuss the following points and more:

• What Alfresco is hearing from their customers and community on their needs and desires around the cloud
• How the benefits of cloud computing differ between SMBs and large enterprises
• The importance of Open Source to the cloud
• Alfresco's current and long-term cloud computing strategy
• Outside of ECM, other industries that can benefit most from cloud computing

Listen to or download the 8:55 podcast below:

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----------TRANSCRIPT----------

JM: Today we're going to talk about cloud and we're also going to talk about enterprise content management. And the first thing I want to ask you is what are you hearing from your own customers and the Alfresco community on their needs and desires around cloud computing capabilities?

IH: It's interesting when you speak to people; it reminds me a lot of the early 90s and the Internet. At that time I was living in London, I came to San Francisco, and everybody was talking about the Internet, and I said to my friend from Chicago, none of my customers talked to me about the Internet. And he said none of mine in Chicago do as well; it's kind of a San Francisco/Valley thing.

And then six months later, that was all you ever heard about and I think there are real parallels with the cloud and that it's much bigger in San Francisco than it is in London but ultimately it will be as disruptive now as big an impact as the Internet. There's some stats we looked at that was saying cloud services will be a $44 billion business by 2013. And it's not just about the public cloud as well. I think Forrester was saying for 44% of enterprises are looking to build private clouds inside their firewall so I think it's going to have a very far and long reaching and in clouds.

And specifically, what we see at the moment is for our customers what they really wanted to have was the flexibility to choose Alfresco and just say I want to buy ten units. And they don't have to say up front if they're going to run it on an Intel chip, or a Sparc chip, or a VMware, virtualization, or a private cloud, or Amazon. They just want the flexibility to deploy that when and where they want so I think that's the thing that clearly came back to us is that one has to know up front exactly what they're going to deploy your software in the public, private, virtualized or bare metal.

Right. Now, in your opinion how do the benefits of cloud computing differ between small to medium-sized businesses and large enterprises?

So I think if you look at software, the kind of the no-brainer is, it doesn't run in thin air; you got to install it and I think you already build benefits up. And when you install software, you install a stack, which is the software, the versions, the patches, and you optimize it. And what the first step really, really do is virtualization which can consumerize that whole installation process and you can kind of provision something in hours instead of days and consolidate virtual machines onto a single piece of hardware and really reduce your hardware cost.

And when we look going forward, what a cloud does is just take that one step further actually, consumerizes deployment of a stack maybe an Amazon image but you have a portal to provision it and it consumerizes the billing, it consumerizes the elastic expansion and allows you to have a variable cost the way you were (indiscernible). Now when you look at those generic benefits and compare them to what a SMB wants and enterprise wants, and they're kind of subtlety different. The SMB's probably going to be using the public cloud and what's really driving them is simple rollout, low cost and a low dependency on IT.

Whereas I think if you look at enterprises, they're much more looking at private clouds to reduce that the large cost. But they already want the flexibility to roll software out very quickly, be nimble, elastically expand and potentially cloud burst into a hybrid environment. And the other thing we're seeing more for medium-sized businesses is its very expensive to put in place in its vast recovery system so they're really looking at the public cloud as their potential disaster recovery system.

Sure, that makes sense. Now, let's talk a bit about open source. What's the importance of open source to the cloud?

We look at open source as it's historically paired the Internet with the things like the LAMP Stack as the infrastructure and then you've got things like WordPress and MediaWiki for blogging and wikis. And similarly, its power in the cloud. You look at Amazon, their virtualization is actually Zen, the de facto operating system they use there is Linux and they've now expanded that to be Red Hat. They now distribute MySQL.

And interestingly, if you look at the majority of the Amazon images, the AMI's, most of those are open source products and I think that's predominately because open source has proven itself previously to the Internet scale but also the licensing is very ubiquitous and easy to distribute in the cloud and when you want to buy it its very low cost as well. We've seen similar kinds of things with Google really extensively using open source in the cloud.

Now, why bring open source enterprise content management into the cloud? What makes the two a good match?

I think if you look at historically, people have collaborated on the cloud around content, with blogs, with wiki's, in a social sense, in non-collaboration so there's always being an innate need for managing content, effective in those environments. So for example, if you collaborate on content, and then you agree this is kind of the where you want to go, it tends to have to go through a kind of draft review approval process before you put an app somewhere else. So I think there's a real need for content services in the cloud.

And we originally announced putting our content services into some of the Lotus products like Quickr, Portal and Lotus Notes as well. So I think generically that inside the company or on the web, specifically, in a collaboration space, people need content services and we saw a big demand for that. And the kind of process we went through is first thing we put out was a prebuilt AMI Amazon image of the Alfresco stack for community developers. Now by the fact to default, whenever you try Alfresco the default way to do that is in the cloud on Amazon and you can have an image which isn't just Alfresco and the Alfresco stack; it has prebuilt content so you don't go into an empty repository and prebuilt video tutorials as well.

It's a great user experience that you can then reset every day to go back to the original content and the original tutorials as well. Then we also looking at the harmonization that mentioned upfront that customers want. They don't want to be penalized for running on the cloud or penalized for running internally. They just want to have harmonization of the product that they want to buy to choose where to deploy it on an Intel chip, a Sparc chip, on VMware, or Amazon. So we're able to roll our software out and have it supported in the cloud as well. The other thing we then built on is if you think about the cloud as consumerizing how you rollout software. We worked with a company call RightScale to get consumerized how you rollout complex deploys like a load balancing and clustering of Alfresco. Well, that got a lot of interest so you basically go through RightScale and you spin up a cluster as simply starting up an AMI.

Very interesting. Now, what has Alfresco and its partners done to put cloud computing into actual practice?

So I think the core thing that we want to provide for both ourselves and our partners is there's a new standard coming out called CMIS and that really is the equivalent of SQL off the database industry. And if you look when you look at the kind of partner ecosystem in the mid-90's and pair all of that to today, when Oracle had SQL-92 and the other vendors in the industry had that, certainly an application writer could write -- not just against Oracle but...Formix and DB2 etc.

Uou had a much bigger market opportunity and Oracle even though it had its own CRM, HR, and manufacturing systems. It worked with PeopleSoft. It worked with Siebel. It worked with SAP and that created a great demand that pulled through database sales. And we see an equivalent kind of partner ecosystem around content applications and those content applications need to get standard based repository. So we worked very hard on the miss your own CMIS. It's going to be approved by ISIS very soon.

And we see CMIS as opportunity in the cloud to create an ecosystem around a CMIS repository that's specifically to be very, very consumable in the cloud, to be optimized for cloud, to have things like lightweight scripting and to have cloud ready AMI's built on top of Alfresco that run content applications and those tend to be written by really our partners. So we see a real opportunity to create a CMIS ecosystem in the cloud.

And moving forward, what is Alfresco's long-term cloud computing strategy?

I think the long-term strategy is to focus on CMIS. We see that being the big opportunity to become simple to consumed, simple to scale out a seamless repository in the cloud for partners to write applications against.

And one last question. Outside of enterprise content management, what other industries do you think can benefit most from cloud computing?

Yeah, it's kind of interesting. There was a very good report by Forrester looking at cloud adoption and looking at how it differed by the type of company. Small businesses are already looking at how to use the cloud for e-mail and they've historically done that in the host environment. Mid-sized businesses are looking at the cloud for databases and the web. Enterprises are looking at it for really a test in their environment and I think the other big obvious thing that's going to continue is the whole collaboration space with collaboration and wikis and blogs and the social space as well.