Archive for the 'Mobile Cloud Computing' Category

Mobile Cloud Computing and Cloud Phones!

By Olafur Ingthorsson on August 10, 2010 in Cloud Computing and Mobile Cloud Computing. 2 Comments

I recently started leading a new multi-national research project about Mobile Cloud Computing, it’s development, impact and potential opportunities for communication providers (telecoms). It seems to me that Mobile Cloud Computing is going to become increasingly important in the the near future in terms of providing browser based access to more and more cloud-based applications and services. Instead of downloading and installing applications on the mobile handsets (smartphones, tablets, etc.) users will access them directly in the cloud and display through the mobile browser, i.e. analogous to Software-as-a-Service provisioning. Some predictions include:

In Gartner’s 2010 key IT predictions for organizations, mobiles phones are expected to overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide by 2013.

ABI Research predicts that there will be nearly one billion end users accessing the “mobile cloud” by 2014. Smartphone applications will move from the handset itself to the cloud – creating a ecosystem for new kind of smartphones – sometime termed “Mobile Cloud Phones”.

There are many reasons for this to materialize. For example, developers are increasingly discontent by being forced to develop and maintain applications that are exclusive for certain mobile phone platforms, e.g. iPhone, Android. This is both costly and limits developers to adhering to the rules of the platform owner – and, sometimes a limited market segment. Many users are also frustrated to have no choice but purchasing a powerful, and more often expensive, smartphone to have the possibility of running mobile apps.

It is clear that with the emergence of the iPhone and the App store, there is already a huge supply of applications avilable. However, most of these applications require users to download them to the handset, install them and run on the handset. Concequenlty, smartphones are becoming increasingly advanced and powerful, embodying sophisticated computing architecture and operating systems. The best analogy could perhaps be the Wintel cooperation – whereas a new version of Windows OS required the user to upgrade to a more powerful Intel processor.

Instead of handset-centric installation, new Cloud Phones will be able to utilize 4G, LTE networks to their fullest and perhaps adapt specifically to certain cloud provider applications or infrastructure. This will be a very interesting segment to investigate and there are many questions that arise. For example, will some of the current smartphone platforms, e.g. the Symbian, MeeGo, Apple’s iOS or Android be dominant in new “Mobile Cloud Phones” – or will there be a completely new platform that has still to be developed!

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The emergence of mobile cloud computing

By Olafur Ingthorsson on March 19, 2010 in Mobile Cloud Computing. 10 Comments

Did yo know that digital media entertainment (DME) traffic currently represented by the iPhone is already 35 times higher than that created by traditional handsets? Many analysts believe that most mobile apps will move from being handset-centric (thick-clients) to the cloud so that mobile terminals will run applications directly from the cloud – especially as apps become larger and feature rich. Today, this is not necessarily the case.

Take iPhone for example – where users purchase and download apps from iTunes AppStore for running them on the phone, although some apps may support back-end processing and data storage as well. Evidently this will change – and why shouldn’t it? Mobile cloud computing is certainly just another method of delivering software applications in a service fashion over the network – in this case wirelessly, e.g. via WiFi and mobile broadband networks such as 3G and WiMax. Mobile network equipment manufacturers and providers are promising that their future Long-Term-Evolution (LTE) platforms will support approximately 170Mbit/s data rate speed (uplink and downlink) in each cell – although in reality the throughput is probably going to be somewhat lower. Obviously the available speed will be dynamically distributed between users within each cell – the more users the less bandwidth for each user.

Users will be able to seamlessly transfer from WiFi networks to mobile operator broadband networks, and vice versa, without necessarily knowing what network he or she is accessing at any particular time. The handset, e.g. smartphone, will make sure that it is selecting and using the most beneficial connection in terms of cost and quality.

Mobile cloud computing

Clearly, this will improve user experience and flexibility and enhance service delivery. Users can access SaaS apps irrelevant of their device, fixed or wireless, PC or smartphone. It should be noted that many analysts, including ABI Research, assert that cloud computing will soon become a disruptive force in the mobile world and, eventually, becoming the dominant way in which mobile applications operate and are delivered.
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