[Editor’s Note: this commentary is being run under the condition of anonymity. In order to insure the candid commentary that defines Open Season contributions, this option is necessary, from time to time. Staff members at HousingWire do not contribute to this section.] I recently got an offer to switch over to cloud computing. Cloud is just a fluffy term for Internet-based operations to me, though I suppose the ease-of-access is somewhat alluring, but I’m still not convinced. Cloud is getting big in the industry as a buzz word, but to me it doesn’t necessarily mark an improvement from Software as a Service (SaaS) or other legacy programs. The problem I have is that having software in the cloud doesn’t automatically make it anything that might be good or important. You can put crappy software in the cloud – and there is plenty of it out there – and still get crappy results. They talk about the cloud like it’s the innovation to end innovations, but then give us all the standard features and benefits of their offering (which used to be installed behind the customer’s firewall and was then offered as SOA-based software and then on-demand SaaS and now Cloud). Cloud is a software delivery method. The advantages are that there is one source of code (good or bad) that can be maintained in one place, its accessible via wide area networks like the Internet to enable workforces to be more mobile, and it can be configured with multiple overlapping data centers in different geographical areas to facilitate disaster recovery and data security. That’s it, as far as I know. Everything else that is great about software has nothing to do with the Cloud and everything to do with the most recent marketing brochure now sitting on my desk. I’m a proponent of Cloud Computing because it creates workspaces as big as all outdoors. But it’s still just a great big network with your software sitting on a server somewhere out there (you don’t care where). The software can still suck. It can just suck for you where ever you are.

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