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It is Cloud Computing. The adoption of Cloud and the high impact that it brings to any IT environment has been the focal point of discussion at every global CIO meet. It further led Nicholas Carr to write an afterword to his bestseller ‘The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google’. In September 2010, I traveled to Monarch Beach, California, to attend the InformationWeek 500 Conference, a large annual gathering of CIOs and other information technology executives. My most recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, had come out a couple of months earlier, and Fritz Nelson, InformationWeek‘s editorial director, had invited me to the event to give a talk on the book‘s themes. As I sat in on the other sessions, though, it became clear that the conference‘s major thrust was cloud computing, a topic that had been the focus of my previous book, The Big Switch. Figuring out ways to capitalize on the promise of ?the cloud,? while tempering the risks of being an early adopter of the powerful new set of technologies, had risen to the very top of the CIO‘s agenda. During a break in the proceedings, I had the pleasure of sitting down for a coffee with Anubhav Saxena, a top executive with HCL, a $5.7 billion IT services company and one of the conference‘s lead sponsors. Anubhav had been an enthusiastic reader of The Big Switch, and he was eager to share with me HCL‘s multifaceted plan to deliver the power of cloud computing to its global clientele. He walked me through a PowerPoint presentation on his laptop, and he gave me an early look at MyCloud, a service the company is developing that will provide companies with a simple dashboard for building, managing, and integrating cloud systems, applications, and services from a variety of providers. In The Big Switch, I had argued that the creation of intuitive ?cloud interfaces would be essential to the broad adoption of cloud computing, and MyCloud was one of the most ambitious cloud interfaces I had yet seen. One thing led to another, and Anubhav was soon asking me whether I had given any thought to writing an afterword to The Big Switch, reviewing the enormous progress in cloud computing technology and adoption that had taken place since the book was published early in 2008. I told him that, having spent the last two years researching and writing The Shallows, I was eager to revisit the subject of cloud computing. A series of phone calls and meetings ensued, which culminated in HCL‘s agreement to provide me with financial, logistical, and intellectual support in writing an update to The Big Switch. The afterword you are now reading is the result of that collaboration, and I am pleased to dedicate it to Anubhav and his colleagues. An Excerpt from the Afterword To read entire Afterword, cloudsrollin About Nicholas G. Carr Nicholas Carr (aka Nick) writes about technology, culture, and economics. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages. Nick has been a columnist for The Guardian in London and has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and other periodicals. Nick is a member of the Encyclopedia Britannica's editorial board of advisors, is on the steering board of the World Economic Forum's cloud computing project, and writes the popular blog Rough Type. He is a sought-after speaker for academic and corporate events. Earlier in his career, he was executive editor of the Harvard Business Review. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English and American Literature and Language, from Harvard University. For more information, please visit http://cloudsrollin.com About HCL ISD HCL Technologies Infrastructure Services Division, also known as HCL ISD, falls in the category of the 4 percent American new public companies that have crossed, or are set to cross, the one billion revenue mark in the first 10 years of their inception. HCL ISD manages mission critical environments and handles over 3 million devices for over 1.7 million end users. The company’s clientele includes 20 percent of Fortune 100 organizations and has over 250 customers, Fortune 1000 companies. The company's fast growth has attracted several bestselling authors to include the HCL ISD case study in their bestsellers. For more information, please visit HCLISD
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