Wellington
A desktop computer, or a bank of on-site servers can eventually carry out a large task. But manypeople aren't prepared to wait the hours, weeks or even months that some jobs could take; whilesimultaneously tying up that computer at the same time.
The cloud, as in web, does in theory have oodles of surplus computing power. Power thattheoretically should be available to anyone at the end of a high speed link up, but as with anythingthat is just there, reliability and guarantees don’t exist.
Enter the new breed of computer power providers such as Amazon or or Windows Azure, who are nowproductising extra processing power yet still are not solving the needs of your average user.
The Internet for most is about paying for what you want, when you want it. One of the problemswith accessing this through these simple platform or server farm owners is they often want to chargein hourly chunks, even if a job itself only takes a few minutes. They generally haven’t designedit to be used on small intervals of time.
Naturally, this makes the would-be users of such Internet grunt more than a little bit gun shyabout using the remote computing power.
"The people with the online computing power aren't down to the granularity, or time intervalsthat most people need," says GreenButton chief marketingofficer, Vivian Morresey.
"Our software sits on top of top of these server farms' platforms that enables micro-billing andtrue elastic or ‘on-demand’ provisioning. Our job is to better amortize, and aggregate the costfor someone wanting to use them to a simple rate."
The Wellington-based company's core piece of intellectual property is 'Job Prediction'.
This enables GB to say how long a job, say a scene rendering, complex spreadsheet analysis ormassive data interpretation exercise, will take and how much it will cost. Currently everyone elsecharges you for what you use, which sounds great, but how do you know how much you need?
"Job Prediction is essentially an online quote for your job," says Morresey. Depending howquickly a client wants a task completed, they can receive what he describes as a 'Goldilocks'pricing. "If you want it in the next hour, it will cost this much, tomorrow, this much, next week,this amount," he says.
Morresey says the company's changing the whole nature of "true, on-demand computing" to the waythat humans think about having an idea of what a job is going to cost - much the same way we like toknow about how much a repair to our car is going to cost at a garage for example.
GB's team of developers has created 'middleware', something that sits between a clients computer(say a design company), and connects to a range of servers and computers around the world.
The company has worked closely with Microsoft, which is well aware that its stranglehold incomputing through desktop software is eroding as the world embraces the cloud. Microsoft has spentUS$4 billion establishing many global server hubs around the world; accessible to anyone with highbandwidth.
Naturally Microsoft is keen for people to start using its server farms, and GB's product is oneway for it to participate in the cloud. Microsoft also likes it, because GB sits on the evolutionpath from desktop application to cloud application - allowing existing desktop applications toutilise cloud computing without a major rewrite of the code.
Under the GB model, at the figurative push of an on-screen button (push the green button, get it)a big job can be pushed out to the cloud, these individual parts of the job carried out acrossperhaps hundreds of computers spread around the world, and then reassembled back in the client'scomputer.
The easiest way to explain it is to give an example of a 'rendering' job - where a simplecomputer model, say of a car driving down a street, is built up with its texture, lighting andshading all correct to produce a photo realistic moving image.
Using GB, that sometimes quite massive computing job, can be priced beforehand, and be deliveredback to the home computer in the time required by the client.
Morresey says while GB's software sits on the desktop, it takes advantage of the cloud.
"People will do more and more there, less on their desktop, and that's one of the reasonsMicrosoft's been interested in us," he says.
The company has worked with Auckland-based IT company
As yet, nothing similar exists on the market, and the company sees its job prediction, andallocation and reassembly software as being applicable to the design and movie industries, financialanalysis, industrial engineering and biotechnology/gene sequencing.
The analysis of oil and gas data is another use.
"People are now learning about other ways to get performance out of the internet," Morreseysays.
"We're just at the beginning of thinking about all that. The timing is right for our productgiven the internet's development and the availability of online computing resource. The mindset ofpeople to trust the internet is also there, and they're prepared to spend money over the net."
Morresey says people are now more comfortable providing credit card details, or paying throughmeans such as PayPal and that these are GB's payment method.