It was good to see both Joe Tucci, EMC chairman, president and chief executive, and Howard Elias, president of EMC’s Global Services and Resource Management Software operations confront the changing world that corporate IT is facing. Speaking at the company’s recent annual bash, EMC World, both stressed the need for IT vendors to move from an applications-centric world to an information-centric one. 

Tucci, in particular, referred to the way that information – often vital business information that should be available to all within a company – lies effectively trapped in individual machines. It should, he suggested, actually be available to all that need it (and obviously have the authority to use it) within The Cloud. He is, of course, correct. But that one sentence contains the essence of the big problem IT vendors now face – and must face down – if they are to get past being hobbled in the long term by sticking with an applications-centric focus. 

That problem is to get business users to accept the sense of an information-centric model. Many would say that they do, of course, but they themselves are largely hobbled by both a justified fear and a larger, unwarranted paranoia encompassed by that phrase: ‘and obviously have the authority to use it’. If their data is somewhere out in The Cloud, then by definition it is no longer `theirs’. If I had £1 for every time I have heard business users talk about the need to ‘own’ their own data I would be a reasonably rich man.  

There is still, and it seems will be for some time yet, a fear and dread amongst many users that not having their own data on their own systems in their own premises puts the whole business at risk. It is as if they fear that, if they cannot go and stroke or kick the very box in which their data is located then it is not really `theirs’ at all and they have lost control of it. What is worse it is, ipso facto, therefore open to all. 

This is inevitably a temporary problem. Many senior business managers – the current ones with the power to make decisions on moving away from information ownership – are still old enough to remember filing cabinets. Perhaps the next generation of managers (and certainly the one after that) brought up with the Internet and a healthy disassociation between information ownership and well managed, secure information exploitation that comes as part of using social software, will not think twice about where their data is. They will just concern themselves with its proper use. 

Some of what constitutes `proper use’ will, of course, still involve companies physically owning their own data. The most obvious example of this is any business process that involves high throughput, high speed transaction management, such as found in modern banking. There, physical issues such as the speed of light get in the way, for it sets the limit on how fast transaction messages can be delivered point-to-point. It takes light some 30ms to go coast to coast in the
US, and many big transaction management systems now need those messages delivered a good deal faster; so The Cloud will get in the way here.  

But in many other business processes, the location of the data is irrelevant – and it is arguably now more vulnerable and insecure than in a well-designed and implemented Cloud system, and can probably be accessed quicker. 

But there seems little sign yet that too many users readily accept these fundamental changes in their attitude. Indeed, I wonder whether EMC’s public lauding of such a change could work against it, with the collective paranoia driving users to walk by on the other side of the street? 

Perhaps the time is coming for EMC – and the other infrastructure players from servers to SaaS – to come together to start an educational process for the user community. A social computing site for educating business users would be a good start point.