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Hi, I'm Julie Schuneman, I'm a distinguished engineer with IBM and I am joining you today
from sunny Florida. Delighted to be here to talk to you for a little while about Cloud.
And, since I can't ask you directly what cloud is? I decided to do a little bit of research
and went off to my Facebook friends. And, I know, for the younger people in the audience
that's for old people but, you know, it's what I use.
So, I got some interesting results , the first one that I like the most is that cloud computing
is counting the number of clouds that float by while you lie on the beach, that's not
what we're gonna talk about today. Most people agree that cloud is where they send their
movies, their pictures, their music and they put it there for safe keeping and to be able
to share it and to know that it's always there when they want it. So, think for a minute
about other things in your life that are always there when you want it. Oh! water coming out
of the faucet when you turn it on or perhaps lights that come on when you flip the switch.
Those things have become just assumptions in our life, at least in most of the world,
so, that we can know we can depend upon it. In the same way, we are beginning to depend
upon putting our assets into the cloud. But, what allows us to have power and water when
we want it? It's because massive investments have been made in power plants and water treatment
facilities and in the infrastructure that connects those large plants with our homes
and our businesses. A similar kind of investment is taking place to support cloud, in order
to allow you to have Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and all of those other wonderful
topics that we have today, that I don't even know about. There has to be this hidden data
centre and no, it's not up in the sky. It's a very, very large building with lots and
lots of powerful servers and lots and lots of storage to put your information in. It
takes a lot of people to understand a lot about hardware and hardware engineering, software
and building software that will automate that hardware and make it do things fast and make
it do things without a lot of human beings. In many respects, what we are doing with the
data centers is what we've done with manufacturing lines. We automate ,we standardize and we
make things happen, I won't say magically but sort of magically. And, in order to do
it, we need some magicians behind the scenes, who are heavily trained in math and science.
So, that we have got the skilled individuals who can go forward and can make these data
centers just sing. But, what about businesses? They are using the cloud to do things like
analyze great quantities of information to better understand how to bring better products
to the market, they are also looking at it in order to support mobility. Think about
all the mobile devices in your life, from your phone ,to your tablet, to your Nook,
to your iPad, right? So, you have got lots of different mobile devices and all of those
need to connect to something somewhere. And, then we've got social media. So, the businesses
are also used in these kinds of techniques and they are also using cloud to be able to
deliver those capabilities. So, if we look out into the future and we see where things
are going, we're gonna need lots and lots of people, to support those big power plants
that are needed to drive cloud computing. So, maybe one day everything will magically
work for us and we can lie on the beach counting clouds as they float by. Thanks, I have enjoyed
our time together. Take care.