Truckcom Blog

So what exactly do people mean when they talk about “Cloud Computing”? What’s normally meant is that the software you’re using isn’t installed on your own computer. Instead it’s installed on a server which you access using the internet.

The use of the word “Cloud” dates back to when people first drew diagrams of the internet - where lots of computers were shown around the edge of the diagram and the bit in the middle (the internet itself which connects all the computers) was shown as a cloud. In reality the internet includes lots of server and networking hardware so it was just an easy way of avoiding going into any of that detail.

But recently the idea has taken hold because server hardware is getting cheaper and everybody’s internet connection is getting faster. A lot of providers have realised that they can offer a “cloud based” solution which minimises the amount of work that needs to be done on the customer’s own computer.

And – guess what – we’ve given it a try and it seems to work pretty well. We had a recent requirement to provide a service to a number of office users running a pan-european logistics operation. The users were spread out very widely geographically – in four different countries, actually – and they all needed to use Truckcom to view tracking data, history, and driver messages for their fleet of vehicles. We installed Truckcom for them on a rented, “virtual” server in the cloud and now they can easily use the system wherever in the world they happen to be.

So now, if a customer wants Truckcom to be hosted by us – that is, they don’t want us to install it on their computer, as we always have done in the past, but instead they want to access it “in the cloud”  – we can easily do this. It’s not just the international operations that might want to do this; consider a small haulier where the management are very mobile – and they want to see what’s going on with a laptop anywhere they happen to be. For this kind of user, the cloud based approach may be a very useful step forward.