Cloud featured prominently at WCIT 2012, in a panel devoted to exploring Commerce and creativity in the cloud
. While at the event, panel participant and Dell director of global cloud solutions, Mark Clifton took some time to discuss with IT in Canada
Dell’s cloud value proposition and coming trends in the market. Dell country manager for Canada, Paul Cooper, joined the conversation, adding a unique Canadian perspective on cloud adoption and on how this could impact Canada’s productivity gap with the U.S. An edited version of this discussion follows.
Paul Cooper: Timeframes and speed of adoption of cloud might be different in Canada. I’ve got some personal opinions around why that is that I could share.
IT in Canada: In healthcare?
Cooper: Those are always the most interesting cases. I think there is a convergence of security, privacy, policy and legislative issues that are creating some inertia here. This is actually problematic for counties like Canada where we don’t necessarily have the critical mass [of demand] that exists in other markets. When that intersects with decisions that companies like Dell have to make, at some point investment considerations take over. We have an offering in the United States where we do medical image archiving in the cloud. It is very popular and growing very quickly, but today access to it is limited to the U.S. We would love to move that service into Canada but we can’t do it from its current location because of data residency issues. So that means that we’d have to recreate it in Canada. And that means we’d have to go through significant analysis around the economics of doing so, and compete within the Dell world for investment in Canada, versus China, versus the U.K., versus Germany and other jurisdictions where there may be quicker, or better, returns.
I suspect that most of our competitors are facing similar challenges in that regard. I don’t know what the answer is; it just seems to be a reality of the world that we live in today where there is a collision of government policy, which may be there for good reason, and the way decisions are made on private commerce side of that equation.
