In preparation for the upcoming annual meeting, Joe Tucci just released his 2012 letter to EMC shareholders. No surprise that he starts with his view of cloud computing and how it is fundamentally impacting IT:
“Cloud computing is transforming the way information technology is architected, deployed and consumed, and EMC has become a leader of this transformation, which holds massive opportunity for our customers and for our business.”
“We believe market adoption of cloud computing represents a fundamental shift in industry dynamics that will be as far reaching and impactful over time as the adoption of personal computers was a generation ago.”
The letter goes on to detail EMC’s financial success and outlook for coming years, touching upon each of the major business units in turn. He also profiles EMC’s interest in Big Data. And he gives a verbal high five to EMC’s continuing improvements in sustainability and energy efficiency, which I believe are hugely assisted by the concepts of cloud.
Of course this letter is all about EMC but Joe gets the bigger impact of cloud on the larger economy too. It isn’t so much a technology impact as it’s a major economic lift to the future of business globally.
The Technology CEO Council
On March 6th, Joe and several members of the Technology CEO council met with President Obama to present their newly published report "High Impact: How IT is Empowering the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs"
The report essentially links business growth to IT intensity. That is, businesses that are IT intensive grew at 5.1% from 2001 to 2009 while overall employment shrank 0.5%.
The primary message of the report is that technology-adept businesses will be the fastest growing and most successful. They are the "gazelles" that will “pioneer new management techniques, capitalize on new production methods, exploit new distribution channels and maximize new organizational structures.”
Essentially, smart people will use the technology to help create new jobs and smart governments will help them through policies that nurture talent, support new markets, help create capital access and invest in the development of technology tools and infrastructure.
The report also makes the point that three breakthrough developments in particular set the foundation for rapid entrepreneurial growth of the gazelles.
These new “platforms for entrepreneurial innovation" are:
- On-demand supercomputing – just go to Amazon and get it for $3 an hour
- Low-cost, high-capacity data storage – how’s access to 791 million times the content in the Library of Congress?
- Ubiquitous, robust connectivity – 3 billion users and 15 billion networked devices by 2015
One other thing that struck me about the report, it doesn’t mention cloud. Only place the word comes up is in the end notes. Just assumed it's there, again.
SAP’s report makes up for that though.
Less than two weeks after The Technology CEO council report was delivered to the White House, SAP released a study that focused on job growth specifically from cloud computing: "Job Growth in the Forecast: How Cloud Computing is Generating New Business Opportunities and Fueling Job Growth in the United States"
The main conclusion:
“…based on numerous trends, leading economic indicators, and investment profiles, cloud computing has the potential to create massive business opportunities and hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the United States and worldwide.”
We who work in the IT world think mostly in terms of technology, customers and related business. Understanding how IT applies to economic growth, to people’s opportunity, jobs and daily life, that’s a view to a greater good we can be pleased to have a part in.
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