Proven wrong about the cloud

Aug 28, 2009 03:22PM by Blaine Sundrud

I have always said that I know three things to be true, so with my apologies to William H. Macy:

1) Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone,
2) There is no difference between Good Flan and Bad Flan, and,
3) You cannot run Adobe Creative Suite apps remotely.

Turns out I was wrong on the last one.

It is a mistake that can easily be forgiven. Let me explain why I was previously convinced of that fact.

For many years DTI (and to be fair, our competitors as well) struggled with the concept of how to handle remote users. Rich clients were fabulous (ours was particularly nice), but failed to perform well when bandwidth went down and distance to the databases went up. Thin clients, or Web Apps solved the problem of data distances but lacked the features that made Rich clients so, well, "Rich."

Many attempts were made: Citrix was the most obvious solution. We invested a lot of time getting Citrix clients tuned and tested and this was where I became convinced of a very painful reality. Citrix (or other similar technologies) can render many apps sufficient to use in an enterprise setting... InDesign, Photoshop, InCopy... not really. Sure they would "work," if your definition of working was a stuttering shifting landscape similar to a WebEx presentation. Any attempts to get a Page Designer to actually use that in production would result in either a lynching or mass retirement by the entire design staff. Reporters learned to survive in Citrix, but only if they didn't have to do a lot of scrolling or selecting. They could deal with the fact that the typing may have been a few words behind them.

Different options came and went but DTI never really produced a usable solution in my opinion. So I added that fact to my list of things I know to be true.

Then DTI announced our Cloud solution. And I was scared. We were proposing to not only host the data in our Cloud facility but to host the entire Application Suite... a true cloud experience... something none of our competitors were dreaming of attempting. And I understood why they would not attempt it, because they too, believed what I believed... it was impossible to run the Creative Suite in a browser.

Then our technician, Fran Gonzalez, came in my office, closed my door, and with a spark of genius in his eyes, said, "go to this URL..."
Intrigued, I play along.
"Enter your password..., now what do you see?"
Pausing, I hesitantly responded, "it's the login app... it just launched from this browser window."
"yes... aaaaand?"
"That's PageSpeed, with InDesign and InCopy on my screen."
"Do they seem jumpy to you?" Fran asked.
"No, it is normal... which database am I hitting?"
Fran paused, "Chandler."
I went through the names of the in-house databases in my head... none were named Chander. Then it hit me. That is the name of our Cloud facility

... in Arizona.

It was working... exactly how we were telling customers that it would work... seamless PageSpeed operation, all hosted in a browser. I figured performance was boosted because we had a big fat pipeline to our Cloud facility.

Then I went to Boston, and I became a believer.

From a hotel room in Boston, using a barely functional wireless modem, I reconnected to Chandler... and proceeded to layout the pages for my presentation with the same speed as if I had the DBs sitting right on my laptop.

I repeated this from a Starbucks in Chicago, a conference center in Atlanta. Wherever I was able to hit the Internet, no matter how small the pipe was, I was able to work with the complete Rich Client.

So now, I make my repentance public. The genius geeks at DTI have proven me to be wrong. The Cloud really works. The entire application for ContentPublisher is served up, not just the data. And I have never been so happy to be wrong in my life.
Though, I am still not wrong about flan.

Authors Note: The views expressed in this blog are entirely my own, and not influenced or strong-armed by DTI, its Board of Directors, its marketing department, nor the scary geeks who live in the back rooms and only venture out in the moonlight.