OPINION: Dreams of an economy in the Cloud

In Trinidad and Tobago weeks before the end of 2015, the Central Bank announced that the country was in a recession. Stories such as T&T in Recession from the Trinidad Express and T&T officially in a recession and the Trinidad Guardian highlighted “a sustained period of general economic decline defined as a decline in GDP for two or more consecutive quarters.”
T&T according to the then Central Bank Governor had suffered its fourth quarter of negative growth and decline. He indicated that “the recession was triggered by prolonged supply disruptions in the energy sector resulted in shortfalls in natural gas which in turn adversely affected output of LNG and petrochemicals.”

David McFadden of the Associated Press in the extensive article Trinidad faces downturn as energy prices collapse reported that,

“After two decades of nearly uninterrupted prosperity, the government is being forced to scale back spending by 7 percent…

‘We must all appreciate that the circumstances we now face as a nation require sacrifice and managed adjustment in our living standards,’ Prime Minister Keith Rowley cautioned in a recent speech. This newly constituted government having come to power in September 2015 has had to face some harsh realities.

Trinidad gets roughly 45 percent of its gross domestic product and 80 percent of export revenue from the energy industry. In June 2014, the price of Trinidad’s benchmark crude was $106 per barrel and the government had drawn its 2015 budget anticipating $80 a barrel, but the price has plummeted to near $30. Prices for liquid natural gas, Trinidad’s main export, have declined by some 45 percent.

Trinidad and Tobago has few local industries so the economy is almost entirely dependent on foreign exchange. The government is calling on businesses to find cheaper sources of imports and for consumers to buy whatever locally produced goods they can find.”

Following these developments, the government has begun implementing various measures recently in an attempt to address the situation. One of these recent measures has been the addition of taxes to items that were previously zero-rated like computer hardware. VAT which had been removed from computer hardware in 1997 in order to among other things, aid in the increase in device penetration within the population is being re-instated.

At this point when the citizens and businesses are being called on to do more with less and these news headlines are casting a dark shadow over the foreseeable future. One wonders whether there may be a silver lining hidden among the clouds. And there well may be.

One of the main advantages of the advance of technology has been cloud computing also known as ‘on-demand computing’, which according to Wikipedia, is a kind of Internet-based computing, where shared resources, data and information are provided to computers and other devices on-demand. The main key to cloud computing is that it relies on the sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale over a network.

As such cloud is not just some buzzword but can be of real tangible benefit to businesses and consumers not only for an energy producing island facing a downturn in the economy due to low oil prices but throughout the region.

2016 is expected to be a year with great advance in the adoption of cloud computing as our surrounding context for everything. Andrew Froehlich, in making 8 cloud computing predictions about 2016 and what it means for cloud computing expects, foresees that barriers to entering the cloud will all but disappear.

“Enterprise organizations that were unable to move services to the cloud due to strict compliance requirements or regulations will find that most of these barriers to entry will disappear. Governments are adjusting rhetoric to become more cloud friendly, while cloud providers are offering more services that satisfy regulation/compliance requirements.”

This is good news for local and regional businesses looking at how they can leverage the cloud for the provision of services whether through government contracts or the wider marketplace. Businesses will look to the cloud as they reduce their traditional IT spend on their own infrastructure and move to a pay for your use model.

And as a region looking at additional areas for economic growth the following trend highlighted by David Linthicum  should be paid keen attention to.

“Cloud computing needs people who can build, run, and design clouds — even talk clouds. We don’t have enough of these people now, so let’s get more through training and use certifications to ensure they know their stuff. The number of training companies focused on cloud is exploding, and there are certification offerings, both from the providers themselves such as Amazon Web Services and Google, and from training companies that provide more general training. “

This is an area in which the Caribbean region can quickly garner expertise as we address local needs and begin to shift away from solely local opportunities for our products and services to providing real value to a growing global cloud market. The key for us will be how much we can see the cloud as providing the opportunites for the reduction in computing costs and the facilitation of growth. But most vital will be how willing we are to vigourously pursue these opportunities and develop new businesses.

Andre has over 15 years of experience in the Caribbean technology industry, contributing to a mix of private sector and non-profit projects deploying ICT solutions leveraging networking and hosted infrastructure management. He is the Business Development Manager for Mobile Products at Teleios Systems and a member of the coordinating team for the Caribbean Network Operators Group. Follow on Twitter: @AndreMEdwards.