Cloud lined with solid silver

Given that business software vendors have for several years been encouraging manufacturers to save thousands, even tens of thousands, of pounds by moving to cloud systems, it's odd that the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) should award £12m of grant funding for further cloud R&D. But so it has. Six new projects have been launched – all part of a £45m investment in manufacturing research announced last month by David Willetts, minister for universities and science. To be fair, they don't just involve cloud computing: 'crowd-sourcing', gaming technology, ICT dashboards and platforms are also in there. All are billed as exploring new ways of developing products, managing manufacturing firms, and monitoring and controlling production itself. If you like, virtual world meets physical enterprise. As Mark Claydon-Smith, lead for the EPSRC's Manufacturing the Future project, puts it: "Advanced manufacturing is highly knowledge-intensive and ICT has a huge role to play in improving manufacturing intelligence, supporting collaboration, increasing efficiency, speeding up innovation and enabling new business models and technologies." Pretty all-embracing then. And with subjects ranging from intelligent decision support to product-service systems, collaborative manufacturing and adaptive informatics – and involving the Universities of Bath, Brunel, Coventry, Loughborough, Nottingham, Sheffield and Strathclyde – it's clear that this is a serious exercise. Nevertheless, 'Cloud manufacturing – towards resilient and scalable high-value manufacturing' seems, at first sight, a strange choice for R&D. Even more so, since it's no longer just the mainstream manufacturing ERP solution developers that are making claims about cloud-based implementations. Most recent to offer cloud as an oven-ready proposition is Trivaeo, with a service claimed to provide six business applications integrating workflow with 50-plus office tasks. "Using cloud services to automate key office tasks, such as CRM, HR, document management and service desk, can transform an organisation," trumpets Trivaeo CEO David Claxton. He also insists that companies across the UK have already done so. So why the government's new zeal around cloud et al? Perhaps the clue is in that project title: resilience and scalability. With the industry plagued by worries around virtualised server hacking and protecting remote data centres, uptake remains low. So the goal is a new reassurance around robustness where cloud is concerned – both at the infrastructure security level and in terms of the breadth of its application.