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As a student of Johns Hopkins University, I get exposed to various aspects of healthcare almost everyday in all of my classes. Additionally, healthcare has been a subject of interest for all relevant magazines, newspapers and blogs because of the introduction of President Obama's Universal Healthcare law. Thus whenever I encounter a new technological innovation, I tend to be curious about its impact on healthcare industry. In this post, I will try to reveal how healthcare industry can leverage benefits of cloud computing to improve patient care and to make healthcare more affordable. In my second post titled " Why Should MBA Students Pay Attention to Cloud Computing", I have introduced the concept of readiness of various industries towards adopting cloud computing. ICD estimates that ( http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/download/features/2012/IDC_Cloud_jobs_White_Paper.pdf ) healthcare industry would be slow in adopting cloud computing because of regulations and security...

We all know what Semiconductors are. Semiconductor materials have intermediate conductivity between conductors and insulators. Silicon and Germanium are examples of semiconductor materials.  If you want to know the basics of semiconductors, this site should be very helpful to you.  http://www.wsi.tum.de/Institute/Scientificbackground/AnIntroductiontoSemiconductors/tabid/65/Default.aspx There are three most commonly used semiconductor devices, namely diodes, transistors and integrated circuits.These devices together are essentially the building blocks and brains of almost all electronic devices such as computers, mobile phone, electronic appliances etc. The CPU in your computer and smartphone uses microchips that are made of silicone semiconductor. Below is a picture of such a microchip ( http://www.topnews.in/chip-vendors-track-losses-299220 ) Here is a video that would give you a comprehensive view of this very important sector that has been a growth factor for many industrie...

In this post, I want to tell you how the cloud computing providers generate profit and how they can improve their profitability in the future. Current State Let's start with the financial aspects of the current business models of cloud computing providers. There are three components that are important in the business model. Value Proposition Pricing Mechanism (Revenue Model) Cost Structure The diagram below shows how business model of cloud computing is described by Osterwalder, A. in 2004. ( http://www.hec.unil.ch/aosterwa/PhD/Osterwalder_PhD_BM_Ontology.pdf )  As I understand it, the value proposition of a particular provider would determine what the provider's cost structure would be and what kind of price the provider can demand from its customers. Thus a short discussion of the current value chain is necessary to understand the cost structure and pricing mechanism.  Value Chain The diagram below( http://www.happiestminds.com/services/it-services/cloud-business-solutions )...

In my last three posts, I have introduced the concepts and technology behind cloud computing, how cloud computing can potentially change business models of companies in various sectors, some critical issues with cloud computing and how the future is projected for cloud computing. In this series, I am going to talk about relevance and benefits of cloud computing for particular industry sectors. As has been projected by several research firm such as Forrester and Gartner,the potential future demand of cloud computing exemplifies the pervasiveness of cloud computing. Such a characteristic of this technology is bound to attract more firms to enter the cloud computing industry as providers. Currently, the landscape of this sector is characterized by the presence of big firms . In this post, I am going to point out some of the key characteristics of the sector and the competitive landscape of the sector from a provider's point of view. As can be seen from the list below ( http:...

This would be my third and final post on the introduction of cloud computing. In previous two posts, I introduced the basic concepts and technologies associated with cloud computing, various advantages of cloud computing and micro and macro economic impacts that cloud computing can potentially generate. Now let us analyze this technology critically to find out some of the disadvantages and other critical issues associated with cloud computing and the whether providers can overcome such issues in the future. Recently Amazon's EC2 faced outage in its Virginia data center that affected more than 70 clients including Reddit, Quora and New York Times (( http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/22/technology/amazon_ec2_cloud_outage/index.htm ). Amazon links many of its data centers together to protect customers from an isolated failures. Such a strategy should ensure a downtime of 4.4 hours. But the recent outage has lasted for 36 hours. Amazon explained that a 'networking event' caused many...

If you are a MBA student like I am, you must be wondering why you should pay attention to this emerging technology. My view on the economic benefit of cloud computing is that even though it is in its nascent stage, it is bound to grow enormously because of its potential as a cost reducer. Even though some companies are still reluctant to adopt this technology, they will be compelled to shift to cloud to sustain competition from the early adopters. As future business professionals, we need to take a deep look at the technology because in future we might work for a firm that is a provider of cloud computing or our firm might be a user of cloud computing. We would also need to know how our firm can leverage this technology to reduce cost or to gain other competitive advantages. In this post I will discuss the growth prospect of the cloud computing industry, how cloud computing can release resources for user companies that can be used for new innovations, how cloud computing will ...

‘Cloud Computing’ is not as mysterious as it sounds. The term originates from a practice rather than the physical location. In early days, researchers, engineers, designer and developers used picture of cloud to represent internet while designing web applications. This metaphor has continued in the concept of this technology.  The 'Cloud' is a combination of hardware, storage, network, services and interfaces. The following picture which I found in the website   http://www.greenit-monaco.com/en/cloud-computing.html  , clearly shows the constituents of the cloud and the representation of the combination as cloud. Before we go into its functions and offerings, I wanted to introduce the standard definition of 'Cloud Computing'. As a researcher, we always had to know the standard definition and I like the practice because it brings me at par with others in the field. NIST (   http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf  )  defines 'Cloud Co...