Analysis: Rise of the cloud - this time it's personal

The personal computer is dead, again. Long live the personal cloud

Earlier this month Gartner published a report, The New PC Era: the Personal Cloud, which predicts that by 2014, the personal cloud will replace the personal computer at the centre of users' digital lives.

"Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life," said Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner.

Personal cloud has implications for all CIOs because it impacts the manner in which IT services are delivered to employees; and specifically for CIOs in business-to-consumer organisations, because it impacts the manner in which consumers interact with the organisation.

Looking beyond the creation of a new buzz-phrase, the personal cloud is Gart­ner's neat shorthand for the aggregation of services which users can access anywhere, any time using any device.

Each individual's personal cloud may be different, in that it will be made up of different services, but each service will be centralised, whether it be a uniform one-size-fits-all banking app or a customisable ‘daily-me' news feed.

Much of this is already well in train: PC sales are fairly flat - Gartner predicts a growth of 4.4 per cent in 2102 ­- while sales of tablets and smartphones are rising.

The installed base of PCs is huge - around 1.5 billion, depending on what is counted. But this year's forecasts presage a shift away from PCs towards other formats in the near future. Mobiles are already the default access device in booming emerging markets where PCs and broadband infrastructure are too expensive.

Gartner identifies five "mega-trends" that are driving the shift in focus from personal computer to personal cloud.

First, consumerisation: a consumer taste for entertainment technology has bled across into the corporate world. "Infotainment" and "prosumers" were the harbingers of what is now a full-scale democratisation of IT that encompasses everything from iPhones to Facebook.

Second, virtualisation has "freed applications from the peculiarities of individual devices", says Gartner. It also makes possible the massive datacentres on which cloud computing depends.

Third is the change from large mono­lithic applications to slender apps. The concept of apps - small footprint mini-applications with dedicated functionality - dates back to at least the mid-1990s when "applets", downloaded from the corporate LAN, were espoused by the likes of Novell as a reaction against the "bloat­ware" from vendors such as Microsoft, whose software was criticised for using up too much computing resource.

Analysis: Rise of the cloud - this time it's personal

The personal computer is dead, again. Long live the personal cloud

Fourth, the self-service cloud. Capabilities are no longer limited by the functional profile of the device in an individual's hands but by the capabilities of the services they are accessing.
And lastly, the shift to mobility, which is all about having access wherever and whenever it is required, not just when sitting in front of a PC.

Personal cloud is already impacting retail, personal banking, digital services, such as mobile telecoms, and the provision of public services.

So is this the death knell of the PC era? Obituaries are frequently written prematurely in the computer industry. Mainframes have flourished in robust remission two decades after client-server computing supposedly killed them off. And cloud computing looks like it will keep mainframes alive for many years to come.

"Many people call this era the post-PC era, but it isn't really about being ‘after' the PC," Gartner's Kleynhans said. "Rather [it is] about a new style of personal computing that frees individuals to use computing in fundamentally new ways to improve multiple aspects of their work and personal lives."

From the user end view, personal cloud looks like fragmentation: a proliferation of devices and channels through which access is granted. But from another perspective personal cloud ushers in a new era of centralisation.

The approximately 30-year evolution of the PC, encompassing networks, client-server, thin client and now cloud computing, has been the struggle by centralised IT to regain control over multiple versions of corporate data created on disparate PCs. Cloud is the culmination of that control: data has been re-centralised; access remains free.

The personal cloud isn't the death of the PC so much as its demotion. The PC has become just another item in a growing arsenal of access devices.

"Consumers will now look at a task that they have to perform, and they will determine which device will allow them to do it in the most effective, fun and convenient way," said Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner. "The device has to meet the user needs not the other way round."
Personal computing (a concept) as opposed to the personal computer (a device) will live on in tablets, ever-more sophisticated smartphones and anything in the internet of things with a human interface and internet access.