Cloud computing is on a target to generate billions in revenue and is experiencing something of a revival. It's a revival when you consider that historically our access to computers used to be in the cloud...albeit the cloud was some data center and we were wired to that cloud with a hard wired terminal. Just look at this picture and the terminal behind me (circa 1980's when I was worked as a COBOL programmer and used machine language and JCL to submit these to the mainframe that was hundreds of miles away from my desk)! 
This recent article in the NY Times (The Business Market Plays Cloud Computing Catch-Up) highlights the catch up on the part of the business market and predicting significant growth:
I.B.M., a bellwether in the corporate technology market, forecasts that it will have $7 billion in cloud revenue by 2015. Of the total, $4 billion will be customers shifting to cloud delivery from the company’s traditional software and services, and $3 billion is expected to be entirely new business.
and Dell is invest $1 billion over 2 years "largely for cloud offerings". Healthcare, while often a laggard in technology is also marching towards cloud based services realizing that complex software solutions can be delivered more cost effectively in a Cloud Based strategy. This 2009 paper on Cloud Computing and Healthcare; Bad Weather or Sunny Forecast? (pdf) makes the point that this is an almost irreversible trend and entrants such as Microsoft and Google (HealthVault and Google Health) suggest this will be an increasing trend. Offering more solutions, more processing power and more storage at lower prices will provide a slew of choices and accelerate technological innovation in healthcare IT and while there are challenges and concerns relative to security and reliability the overall trend will have a positive impact.
In line with these trends is the announcement of the Nuance Dragon Mobile SDK and the Nuance Healthcare Development Program (NHDP)bringing Speech to the Cloud is significant offering a simple way for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and healthcare providers to integrate Nuance value added functionality directly into healthcare applications in the cloud. This brings streaming speech to the cloud allowing mobile devices and think clients to offer fast and accurate real time medical speech recognition. Integration is a snap and possible on multiple platforms including
- Apple IOS,
- Windows browsers : IE7 / IE8 / Chrome / Firefox,
- MacOS browsers: Safari / Firefox,
- Windows .NET
Calgary Scientific have already shown this integration off in the ResolutionMD mobile product and interest since the announcement has been great. Like many others we are
“We’re moving to where the puck is going in this industry,”
Cloud computing will impact so many different areas in healthcare and technology in general and voice enabling these interactions will be key for some of these interfaces and given the level of interest will likely be offered soon.
Could not agree with you more. We are actively in developing a cloud based solution for healthcare ourselves in Bangalore/India. The seamless scalability of cloud computing and inherent cost advantages brings enormous benefits. Thanks for the link to the research in this area!
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