About Cloud Computing . That has been one of the hottest topics in the Technology World in the last few years. What kind of chaise just what kind of changes can Cloud Computing brings your life . We are delighted to have as our special guest dr. Tzicker chiueh, the director of the Cloud Computer center to talk about the state of technology and the prospects for his him for his future development. Welcome to the program. But inc. You for having me. Im very glad to be here. Im going to start off with a very generic issue. A lot of people are asking what exactly is Cloud Computing . This is a commonly asked question. The word cloud in Cloud Computing to me means a data center accessible over the internet. It is associated with the word loud, so it gives people many romantic imaginations but its just a data center over the internet so people can access a service and store them in those data centers. And those information stored in based on Cloud Computing technologies, what kind of changes are we likely to see in peoples lives . Cloud computing basically has three characteristics. One is the kind of application used to run on enduser devices like gmail or email or a map search and so on, these are now moved to some data centers on the internet. Thats number one. The second one is the kind of i. T. Infrastructure you see an individual corporations or universities are now going to be centralized and consolidated. Thats the other major change. The third change is the Cloud Computing encourages ondemand resource provisioning and usage. Therefore the usage base and charge, to put it simply, to encourage renting versus buying services and resources great rex so i will say to my students at the university, Cloud Computing can do one thing, and that is very direct in our daily lives, which is what you mentioned in point number three. A lot of things you dont need to buy anymore. There is a difference between ownership and possession. You dont need to spend 400 or 500 to buy a cd or dvd. You can rent it, get the materials or download it from Cloud Computing technologies, correct . Yes especially for a small business. This notion of buying hardware is going to be outdated. People are going to rent these i. T. Services and this is ready common in the United States nowadays great nowadays. Allowing an individual to spend money on hardware. What is the state of the development of Cloud Computing technologies . Has it been progressing at the pace people at the beginning projected to be . Yes. Right now, i believe this year, 2013, is apparent area if you look at the biggest player in this space, it is amazon web services. The valuation of wall street on amazon is a large part not its Retail Business but its virtual i. T. Renting business. This is still most successful in the United States but if you look at it territory, it moves to tokyo, singapore and australia. This trend is now moving not only from the United States to europe but readily to the asia pacific area as well. What are some of the similarities and differences between the concept of Cloud Computing and virtualization . Virtualization to me is one of the enabling technologies for Cloud Computing. Two of the major benefits of Cloud Computing the notion of always on and inelasticity. Virtualization happens to be able to support that. Simply put, virtualization is a technology that can abstract a piece of hardware resource into Virtual Services. Becoming Virtual Services or resources exit much easier to manage it. No longer you think of a computer as hardware. You think of it as a file. Like whatever you can manipulate in your folder. It makes it very easy to manage. On top of that, to maximize utilization of your Hardware Resources and encourage a marketable entity to share the resources simultaneously without interfering with one another. With the advancement of Cloud Computing technologies, one thing that is clear in peoples daily lives is we are going to be buying less physical things and renting more. Because the fact that now peoples homes or houses are not as big as they used to be with more and more people and a scarce supply of land space. People will be having problems with storage if you keep buying cds and dvds. Is that why in the last few years we see Cloud Computing technology becoming more important and popular in the daily lives of people . Thats right. One of the key benefits from our experiences, you can think of the benefits of Cloud Computing in terms of the point of the individual consumer and corporation. From the individual consumers point of view, whatever benefit you just mentioned. The most important one is it can go anywhere and access my file. That turns out is one of the major benefits from an individual consumers point of view. From the i. T. Point of view, there is a circle of advantages most people would not appreciate. The notion of converting capital expense into operational expense. That is very important from a tech point of view. It turns out that cloud enables this kind of business model. Given the fact we have seen and talked so much about Cloud Computing technology, what do you think are the likely consequences that it changes that Cloud Computing is making in our lives on future generations . For example, a lot of people reverting to electronic books into the buying physical books. They referred to renting services or music and movies instead of buying the actual physical things. Do you think in the future one day all the physical books, cds, dvds will disappear completely . Almost all the digital things will probably eventually reside on the cloud. Starting from what you use to compute, your endpoint devices like your laptop or Desktop Computers and whatever you store on your local disk, eventually this will go to the cloud. Not to mention things like your maps and dictionaries. They are already in the cloud already. Almost all Things Digital will eventually move to the cloud and theres not much reason to hold a personal copy other than to speed up access. Cloud is still doing a better job. A lot of people watching the program today may be thinking that is it very expensive to store all the data and files i want to store up in the cloud . Actually at this point cost has not been an issue. Most people worry about two things one is security. The other is longevity. How do i know this startup stores my file 10 years from now . Its a statistic people show that when there is a fire in your house, the first thing you want to bring is your photo album. Thats the most precious memory of your entire life. The same thing will go to whatever you store on the cloud. You worry about the longevity of a not just for your lifetime, maybe you want to pass this to your grandchildren. That is something to be concerned about. Another issue people may have doubts over is how big is the cloud . Is it unlimited supply of Space Available according to Cloud Computing technologies . For all practical purposes, i believe it is unlimited. If google gives me 10 gigabytes, its three or four years, i only use less than 15 . And i like to think of myself as a pretty heavy user. 10 gigabyte may seem like not too much but as far as what we are concerned, you can extend very easily from google plus point of view. The technology is there, its just a matter of managing it. You are the general director of the Cloud Computing center for mobile applications grade what kinds of applications can we see in terms of applying these Cloud Computing technologies on a mobile device . Right now, our center does not do too much work on the mobile application but we do some cloud applications. One of the big applications we are working on is this socalled Surveillance Video analysis. Probably like 16,000 cameras out there and they have this problem or they spend so much money installing this i. T. Capable camera and when push comes to shove, they ask the hard question what is the benefit . People cannot clearly articulate the benefit. The main reason is no one has the time to look at the video. We need some kind of capability to use programs to go through this video to do interesting things. That is what this cloud application, Surveillance Video analysis is doing. This application can do simple things like if you give me a simple thing like a report, parked at this particular street at 4 p. M. Yesterday. You want to know the trajectory and this morning he went to that place and the car is gone trade you want to know the trajectory from 4 p. M. Yesterday until now. Somebody must have drove it away. We need to scan through the related cameras and do analysis automatically and plot the trajectory. As long as they show up on some camera, we should be able to spot them. That is what this application is capable of doing. We should discuss more about the applications later. We do take the first break on our program. When we come back, we will continue our cover station with dr. Tzicker chiueh. See you in just a few minutes. Welcome back to the second segment of todays program here on the taiwan outlook. Oh were continuing our conversation with dr. Tzicker chiueh, the director of the mobile Cloud Computing center. What is the state of Cloud Computing industry in taiwan . We should look at it from a global point of view. There are two types of businesses in the Cloud Computing space. What is the Cloud Service writer like google and facebook and amazon. The other category is Cloud Solution provider. These are the people who provide solutions for Cloud Services, provide the data center and services. It could be hardware or the usual suspects like ibm, hp, dell and the software would be like microsoft. In this global cloud space, we want to think about where taiwan should position itself in this space. We eventually decided we want to focus on the Cloud Solution provider space. We know that taiwan has an enormous hardware basis and we want to leverage the spaces to enter this Cloud Solution providing business. Right now, we think we are doing reasonably ok. This big Cloud Service provider like facebook and google, they tend to bypass the cloud hardware solution provider. They will say instead of order from you, i might order from your odm grade this business of facebook and google will try to contact our odm directly and order hardware directly. This business has been going on for a while. What you have seen in the newspaper, some of the companies are doing very well in the cloud space. It is mostly in this kind of business. Compared with other neighboring economies like japan , korea and china, who are some of the major competitors for the industry in this regard . The dominant player is United States. The next guy is probably china. Neither japan nor korea are very active in this particular space. Our biggest competitor at this point is probably england china, especially its outcome equipment providers. Given the fact there is intensifying competition from china, do you think there may be opportunities for the two sides to cooperate on the development of Cloud Computing, especially in terms of Service Solution . Probably at this Service Providing business, there is some room for collaboration. But that is probably not i shouldnt say it is very sustainable in the following sense area right now, because chinese tend to have their own brand. They have a very big domestic market so they can just do it grade from the Traditional Hardware in taiwan, instead of doing business with hp or dell, they do business with the ct. Thats not what we want. We want to escalate the taiwanese business to a somewhat more valueadded. That means we cant just do hardware. We cant just do hardware component. We need to escalate ourselves to the hardware system and add some sort of software so it becomes some type of total solution. In this regard, we are in competition with china. There are major challenges that would lead taiwan to take a lot of efforts to overcome in terms of developing this Cloud ComputingSolution Service fighter type of platform. The simple word is software. In particular, i want to emphasize this notion of System Software. The kind of software you directly run on top of hardware that controls how Hardware Resources are used and managed. This is the key missing piece three or four years ago when i tried to find something to do in the Cloud Computing space. It is the key missing piece. At that point, in terms of the technology base, its relatively not ready to develop a System Software technology. Its the kind of organization that has to be building bridging such a gap grade thats why we decide to focus on this area of technology development. Taiwan is well known for computerrelated technologies. How come we dont have industries or Companies Jumping to this System Software area and try to be competitive down the line . Not just System Software but software in general is not really the top career choice for many of the young generation in taiwan because our Electronics Industry is so strong. Many people doing Computer Science are probably more likely to end up being an i. T. Manager of some Engineering Company as opposed to choosing Software Development as a career grade in particular, Systems Software is a difficult area. Within the software area, theres easy software and difficult software. System software is more difficult grade even in academia, there are not many willing to do this kind of research because its very difficult to publish area so people think its not a very conducive to their career development. They tend to stay away from it. As a result, they dont have that many students and we dont have that many talents area you graduated from one of the top engineering and Computer Science schools in the United States, uc berkeley. You also taught for many years in the state of new york at stony brook. Then you came back to tie one roughly four years ago to head the center all these years. What do you think the likely development of the industry after you have been back here for four years. In addition to the lack of talent, what are some of the things the government and private sectors can do together to try to make taiwans Cloud Computing industry more competitive . I have a very strong impression about these kinds of things. About the Software Development efforts in the industry. Before i came back, i used to be a consultant for various companies over the years. People recognize the importance of software. Its not like they dont recognize it, they do. In the last three or four years, i saw governmentfunded agencies and local industries, electronics companies, they evolved from a service into a true convert. They believe in the importance of software to their companies and eventually put the money where their mouth is. Now they want to take the money from their pocket and really invested. So we can really see that change and im glad i came back at the right time. People have been talking about software and some people even became cynical, there is no hope for taiwan to develop software. But i disagree. I think theres a good chance to do something and not only us, we have another organization doing similar things. Some of the companies we work with, they stop using a Software Team to develop technology thats going to be very important to taiwans Cloud Computing industry. Given the fact you have been back in taiwan almost four years and you mentioned earlier that the role for entry is very important in terms of bridging the gap between what is the prospects in the future and what is the reality today. What are some of the major achievements you can identify for us your center has been able to do in the last few years . We focus on System Software. So the product in my center is basically an end to end solution for Telecom Carriers or data center operators. They are able to provide what we call infrastructure as a service. Similar to amazons service.