Personal information, Cloud Computing and Web-to-Print

You certainly noticed that more and more personal things go digital: photos, music, videos, university courses, personal writings, books, etc... Stated differently, if one day I break my computer’s hard drive, I will be in big trouble! Thankfully, I have stored everything in an external hard drive. But, imagine a thief steals my laptop and
my external hard drive: I am again in big trouble. This is why archiving all my digital assets in a place other than my home makes a lot of sense, and I assume you are in the same situation as me!

High tech companies are now imagining that you can store all your information in the “clouds” and they call this technology Cloud Computing. Actually Cloud Computing is a broader concept than storage and incorporates notion such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). Cloud computing uses the huge capacity of servers located in data centers and allows users to take advantage of these servers as a service. Services can be an application (Software as a Service like Google Docs), or it can help developers to combine the capacity of multiple servers for processing purpose or data storage. Companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon already offer Cloud Computing services. Besides the interest of combining the capacity of multiple servers, there is also a financial interest as developers can get rid of the fixed costs associated to own servers.

One interesting example of Cloud computing was the case of the Washington Post which wanted to put on line Hillary Clinton's White House Schedules she wrote while her husband was in Office. The problem The Washington Post faced is that they needed to OCR (Optical Character Recognition) the 11,000 pages of the schedules in a very short period of time. Thanks to Cloud Computing, it only took 9 hours to make it, while if the Washington Post have used a traditional OCR software, it would have required hundreds of hours. This is why Cloud Computing is also linked to the “On Demand” concept: “use it when you need it”.

Coming back to personal information storage, other companies will come up to the market to propose storage services to the consumer. This service will be probably invoiced the same way as utility providers do. Internet providers are today the best positioned to offer these kind of services, but of course we can anticipate that startup companies would take the lead on this new business.

If the consumer market is going to be impacted by “Cloud Computing”, we can expect to see changes in other markets. I think for example of the printing market where printers have to deal with heavy files. In this market, the concept of Web Submission, which is a SaaS application, already exists, but I think it is at a very early stage yet. In general, files transmitted to a printer are generated by a design agency and then sent to the printer through a web submission application. But this web submission application only transfers files with a job ticket attached (instructions for printing). Instead, we can imagine that creative agencies and printers use a common server in the “clouds” to store and share printing files. Besides storage, cloud computing could be used to directly process incoming printing files, instead of performing this operation on a local server, as it is done today. Also other operations can take place in the clouds like color management, imposition, job estimates, etc…In other words, Cloud Computing could make transparent the lengthy steps required before printing, allowing shortened turnaround time, better job management and lower production costs.