OREANDA-NEWS. August 22, 2012. The following column by Mike Gault , CEO of Guardtime Holdings, was published in Aripaev.

For ten years I have been asking myself if Estonia is a country where innovation can really happen or did the “Baltic IT revolution” occur simply because of good timing (independence coming post-internet) and necessity.  Now that it has its own legacy systems would eEstonia sit on its laurels, let entrenched interests resist change and slowly but surely slip down the country IT rankings?  The difference between innovation and invention is execution, could eEstonia really re-invent itself throwing out the old in favor of the new?

How Estonia accepts Cloud Computing will be a fascinating test-case, many people are proclaiming it  as the biggest revolution in computing since the invention of the PC. While there is definitely a lot of marketing hype (typical Estonian response: “We’ve been using cloud for 10 years, back then it was called web hosting”) but at its heart lies a revolution in how we think about computing.