I was invited to join Pilvisauna (Cloud Sauna) organized by Codento Oy on Thursday. While there was yet another blizzard going on outside, the athmosphere in the cozy event among the Finnish cloud industry pioneers was great!

Guest speaker Mr. Martin Buhr from Amazon gave a presentation about Amazon Web Services with some very interesting figures about the exponential growth of AWS. The second guest speaker was a former fellow of mine from F-Secure Corporation, Mr. Pirkka Palomäki, who gave a presentation about the cloud strategy F-Secure Corporation is implementing. It is clearly visible that without F-Secure’s cloud strategy, the rapid detection of new threats would be nearly impossible.

I wish to thank Codento Oy and Mr. Martin Buhr for inviting me to join this event. It was great! Especially great was Codento’s innovative version of an EBS, the Elastic Beer Storage :)

I’ve been keeping a close eye on what’s happening in the cloud computing scene in Finland ever since I jumped on the band wagon this summer. If there were some misunderstandings of whether the Sidekick (you remember, last fall the service went tits up and customers could not access their data) was a cloud offering, currently there is a big trend of calling a lot of things a cloud service while in reality they might not be.

Today, Logica announced their new cloud service (pilvipalvelu in Finnish) which they call as Logica Live Connections. It is based on IBM’s Lotus Connections product family. Something just does not sound right. What exactly makes this a cloud offering? It is said to be billed in user/month fashion which, I guess, should make it a cloud service. I would like to see a bit more than that as with the given information, it resembles more of a SaaS offering. And where can I sign up with my credit card? Either it’s not possible or then it is really well hidden. Anyhow, this contradicts the idea of a cloud service being available with only a sign up. I bet you will need a consultant to start using the service too. I really wonder why it has been branded as a cloud service… is it a valid selling point nowadays? A marketing term and nothing else? Shouldn’t you really concentrate on the good aspects of a cloud service like the elasticity and on-demand possibility of resource allocation if it really is a cloud offering?

There has been a few other cases as well, like Cloud Computing Oy sales director’s pitch about being able to point out where the actual cloud server physically sits. I’m sorry for flaming, but oh man, how wrong can it go! Using terms in a wrong way is harmful for the entire business. Well, they are a startup (I believe) and the business is still in its infancy, but I feel sad (like a panda) if there isn’t anything better going on. The bigger consultancy firms in Finland have layed low with their cloud offerings though HP has shown some muscle with the late HP and Microsoft agreement about delivering infrastructure to application which sounds really promising. One other (smaller) firm I have seen active in the cloud field is Codento Oy which has held a few presentations about the subject and seem to really understand the concept. Good stuff.

But. We Finns could be so much more! We have the correct type of environment to build great data centers as it is relatively cold during most of the year, the electricity is not too expensive, we have the skills, we have the political stability, we don’t even have earth quakes or hurricanes. Google has spotted this and is actually ramping up a new data center in Hamina, Finland. Sounds good, but this is only a data center which needs just a few (50) persons replacing faulty servers. How about a real cloud service center? A one where you get computing power, platform or an application by just browsing a catalog and deploying?