Throughout the business world, IT execs are grappling with whether to commit to cloud computing or not. They ooh and ah over its numerous business benefits, fret over its perceived weaknesses, and test the waters by using niche cloud services or entrusting low-priority applications to cloud service providers.
And as they do, tech-savvy 20-somethings collectively wonder, “huh?”
Måns Adler is one such 20-something. The founder of Swedish mobile video service Bambuser represents a new wave of technologists who come at IT from a fresh perspective. They eschew the philosophies and terminologies of traditional IT—“cloud computing” among them—and instead simply opt to use the technologies that are abundantly available to them so they can focus on building consumer services rather than IT environments.
The most obvious such resource is the world of cloud-based services. Just don’t call it the cloud, or Adler might not follow you. He considers “cloud computing” to be a stale IT term that means little to him. “From my younger perspective, there’s never been a different way of going about it,” he says. “It was so clear from the beginning.”
The beginning was 2007, when Adler started up Bambuser and began work on the company’s service, which enables video to be broadcast over the web in near real time from a mobile phone. The idea that he might have to invest money in servers and software to create an environment for building and delivering Bambuser’s service never even occurred to Adler; rather, he and his founding team just went online and found just about all the tools they needed.
You name it, and Bambuser uses a free cloud service for it. Email? Bambuser relies exclusively on Gmail. Phone service? No reason not to use Skype. Word processing and document sharing? Google Apps works great. Create a private social network for real-time communication and collaboration? Yammer filled in nicely. Usage tracking? Thank you, Google Analytics.
In fact, Bambuser pays for very few of the technologies it uses. It pays a nominal monthly fee for FogBugz, an online bug-reporting service; it pays about $1,500 a month to a Swedish ISP for access to a single server that hosts Bambuser’s development environment, and it spends between $2,000 and $6,000 per month to have its peak video traffic routed through Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud.
That means it costs just a few thousand dollars a month to run Bambuser’s whole operation, an eye-popping number that illustrates the value the cloud brings to startups that can make the best use of the platform. And best of all, Bambuser users not only wouldn’t care, they wouldn’t have the slightest idea they’re using a cloud-based service themselves. “As long as you get it right and the users get a great experience,” says Adler, “they’ll never even think about whether it’s a cloud service or not.”
Given the company’s reliance on cloud services, it should come as no surprise that Adler likes to fill jobs with IT workers in their mid-20s who are like-minded to him, ones who are accustomed to using Web-based administrative tools. In fact, all but one of the company’s dozen employees is in their 20s. The lone exception is CEO Hans Eriksson, a 40-something brought in partly to balance out the staff’s youth. Yet even Eriksson isn’t interested in whether a technology Bambuser uses is a cloud service or not. “For him, the only thing that matters is that it works,” says Adler.
The idea of a technology staff that doesn’t think about whether to use the cloud or not, but instead just charges ahead with Web-based applications and services, is a new concept. It challenges the typical IT approach of carefully evaluating options, running risk-benefit analyses, seeking approval from the board, and undergoing extensive test periods.
It also signals that once today’s 20-something are making the big IT decisions, cloud computing no longer will be one of several options—it will be the ONLY option.