Nation-building via the cloud

By now I'm sure some of you heard about the trip to Iraq taken by several "new media" companies, among them Google, TypePad, AT&T, and Twitter in an attempt to use Web 2.0 (or new media if you prefer) to help rebuild the infrastructure of the war-torn country.

While it is clear that the mission was rewarding for the executives who traveled to Iraq and illuminating for many of the Iraqis, it may not be obvious how the lessons translate for the rest of us. You don't have to be rebuilding your company from scratch to glean some important lessons.

1. Don't be ashamed of using the cloud. In Iraq, Automatic executive Raanan Bar-Cohen noted that Iraqi admins were embarrassed to admit that they were using Yahoo and Gmail instead of an internal server farm, which was the old status quo. The lack of system resources and the expense of setting up enterprise mail servers forced the Iraqi techs to the cloud, and it was working well. The embarrassment faded when the US executives applauded the initiative and the savings.
2. If time is money, cloud services can save you a ton. Eli Lilly is utilizing a cloud services model to get a web server up in three minutes (yes, minutes) instead of the seven and one half weeks it took in the past to deploy a server. Linux cluster deployment time has dropped from three months to a stunning five minutes. Imagine the cost savings in labor time alone. Lilly is using multiple cloud services (among them Amazon) to provide high-performance computing for its scientists, with talk of external collaboration in the future.
3. Scalable computing will benefit small organizations as much as larger ones. Smaller companies and government organizations such as the Library Of Congress are using cloud tools to streamline operations and save money. Many of these companies are using Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service for their scalable computing.

Several of the executives are Twittering their observations of the mission on a regular basis. I found some really interesting commentary from Raanan Bar-Cohen of Automatic (the makers of WordPress) that he posted to his website. Among his observations:

• Can you here me here? - Almost everyone in Iraq has a cell phone.However, since coverage is spotty between the three networks, many people carry two cellphones to ensure that they have coverage wherever they are. Tightening the loopholes in service is a priority, because...
• Heavy SMS service means opportunity. Since Iraq lacks a strong broadband infrastructure (it costs $400/month to use satellite there - I will not complain about my internet service for at least a month), SMS and devices that support SMS can serve as a partial bridge that will offset the fact that only 5% of Iraqis have home access.  In case you missed it, SMS is the fastest growing segment of mobile revenue.

For more impressions about the trip see the interview Twitter co-founder and evangelist (of Twitter that is) Jack Dorsey did with CNN about what the delegation saw.

Iraq strikes me as a unique opportunity - a sort of petri dish for cloud applications if you will. And it's an opportunity for tech to shine when it matters most.