Google Cloud

State after state and city after city, Google is inexorably pulling entire governments into its cloud. To be specific, tens of thousands of state and city employees are beginning to shift over from on-premise systems to Google Apps for Government (GAFG).

Last June (2011), 10,000 state users in Wyoming moved over to GAFG. Now, Utah has announced that 22,000 state government employees will migrate to GAFG in 2012. In addition, the cloud based email and productivity platform will also be available to local governments in Utah.   

The city of Los Angeles has already moved 17,000 city employees to GAFG. Another 13,000 who were about to be moved have been temporarily delayed due to some security issues raised by the FBI which halted LAPD’s move to the cloud.

There is a big list of governments and government agencies that have already declared their move to GAFG a success. The list includes Orlando, Seattle, Des Moines and the District of Columbia and the U.S. GSA and NOAA, among others.

All said and done, there is not much doubt about which way the wind is blowing – one day in the not so distant future, a majority of all the states and their local governments will have their data stored in Google’s cloud.

Google Cloud .Gov ambitions

However, taking over governments does not seem to be enough for the Big G’s ambitions on the cloud.  Google Cloud now wants to power entire robot armies on its cloud. At the recently held Google I/O developer’s conference, they announced a new cloud robotics initiative in partnership with Willow Garage.

Willow Garage and some other interested parties are working on an open source operating system for robots. It is called ROS (Robot Operating System). Apparently Google wants to use ROS to power every robot on the face of the planet, like Bill Gates used DOS to dominate the PC market.

ROS and a javascript package called rosjava will be available as a cloud-based platform which robots can log into for their “intelligence”. Putting all their capabilities and intelligence such as responses based on object recognition into a global database on the Cloud will make robots much cheaper and standardized.

The best part is that what any robot learns will be stored on the Cloud, and instantly made available to all the others. So every robot anywhere in the world using the system will get smarter and better as improvements are made to others all over the globe.

Google Cloud Possibilities

The possibilities are endless and unimaginable, and with Google backing it with their Cloud, it is not just sci-fi movie talk about Arnie and a Skynet that is smarter than humans- taking over the world. This is reality – here and now. Google’s collaboration and enormous cloud computing power will put ROS into robots everywhere on the cheap. They will develop this faster and add the ability to do more complex tasks. Once it reaches a stage where a robot can be trained to do certain jobs, it will mean a whole new revolution. The intelligence would be on the Cloud and a whole army of trained robots could be produced instantly without any more training. Hundreds or even thousands of workers in factories would be laid off just like that. Oops are we running too fast!

Author: Cloud Consultant at CIONNE.com.

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