When we decided to host a videocast on the topic of the Public Cloud: A CIO Perspective, a few people thought we had made a mistake in the title. "Don't you mean private cloud?" they asked. After all, that's the area where most of the current service hosting activity is right now. Are CIOs really thinking about hosting critical apps on the Internet?

That’s one of the questions we posed to our panel of experts — Timothy Chou, Dan Greller and Dave Hansen, during our webcast on November 11 — and I think the responses were very candid, surprising and thoughtful.

I knew that Tim — who headed up Oracle’s On-Demand business for many years and then became a book author, Stanford University lecturer and board member of several startup companies — was an avid cloud proponent. But I was more surprised when Dan, Managing Director at financial services firm, Legg Mason Technology Services, was on board with public hosting as well. Add to that, Dave Hansen’s perspective as former CIO and now General Manager, Management Products & Solutions and Security Customer Solutions, CA Technologies,  and there was a broad spectrum of backgrounds represented, all supporting the idea and citing lots of specifics. See what you think as they state their case in the video and in their answers to audience questions here.

The panelists agreed that we are in the very early stages in terms of hosted service adoption and it’s clearly being led by SaaS applications. Dan said Legg Mason is moving ahead with CRM and ITIL tools in the cloud and is investigating e-mail hosting as well. He says infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is limited to nonproduction environments at the company so far, and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is not yet an active area for the company. Read Dan's responses to audience questions here.

Tim noted that cloud hosting — what he calls "compute and storage services" — began with business applications only about three years ago. In terms of PaaS, “We are in year one,” he says.

Despite the early stage of the market, however, the benefits of agility, innovation, lower support and maintenance costs and fewer resources were cited by all three panelists. And even the bugaboo, security, was described as “an issue but not a showstopper” by Dan Greller, who noted, “We’ve been using ADP [for payroll processing] for decades.”

The call to action for CIOs was to learn all you can about your current computing costs as well as your business needs and start hosting some apps. I can’t recap a one-hour discussion in full, but here’s a quick summary of key quotes and action items:

• Dan Greller: Consider the case for cloud hosting in terms of outsourcing and distributed computing of the past. Use the same practices of due diligence to vet service providers and to negotiate contracts as you have in the past.

• Dave Hansen: You can also automate your portfolio of SLAs electronically to monitor and measure in real time. That will allow you to implement SaaS faster.

• Tim Chou: “Customers and IT for too long abdicated software to their vendors. The tech guys had no idea about the specific industry sector you are in.” Now it’s time to get back into the picture, he says. Ask your vendors — and your in-house developers — to provide apps as a service; customers can now build software in new ways that are not detached from the domain expertise of a business. Moreover, he says, too many companies have no idea how much they pay for computing and software ... as a result, "equipment is often unused, underused and out-of-date," he added. 
  

Still not convinced about the need for public cloud computing? Register and watch the full video and see if your concerns — regarding multi-tenancy, hybrid clouds or change management — have been addressed by these industry experts. If not, start a discussion of your own or send a question to me at editor@smartenterpriseexchange.com, and I will have the panel address your concerns.