Well, coming from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow, the Norwegian based Opera Software is following in the footsteps of the Vikings.  Opera Unite is a technical achievement and if it – or a worthy imitator - is widely adopted, will be a game changer.  The Vikings were the game changers of their day, engineering the best seafaring technology of the time.  They also pillaged and burned a whole mess of Europe, which many people may find reprehensible, but, hey, the Vikings were the best at what they did. 

At its core, Opera Unite is nothing more than a webserver – we’ve had these things for years, of course.  What makes it different is the ease at which it can be set up – download the browser, create an Opera.com account, and you’re done.  By routing through Opera’s servers, you don’t need to mess with VPN, Remote Desktop, IP addresses, or configuring those fiddly little port forwarding settings on your home router – you don’t even need to have access to it – or even to know what a router is – to use Opera Unite.

Right now, the immediate use is to run it on the home computer to access files from work, and vice-versa.  And that’s where the snag comes in.  Opera Unite cannot be considered in any way “secure” – the fact that it connects to a third-party server makes it ripe for a man-in-the-middle attack, people might mistakenly share sensitive information on their work or home computers, and of course, there’s the problems that you’d expect to have with any filesharing app on the PC.

But more importantly, this will have a major impact on performance.  Employees running data servers can choke the network links your company pays for; we have already seen this when highly technical users run FTP or Web servers from their office desktop machines.  Opera Unite doesn’t change the nature of FTP servers – it just places creation and access of FTP servers and hosting services in the hands of the many, rather than the few. 

Even so, I can’t help but think that overall, Opera Unite is a good thing overall.  It reduces dependence on third-party hosting sites and cloud apps – like YouTube.  If there’s a video that YouTube doesn’t like – or has to take down because of a mistaken or fraudulent copyright claim, the video can still be made available.  (Often times, copyright law is abused to get hosting services to remove unflattering footage of a company or organization.)  And if a particular hosting service should die, the data can still be accessed.  In this manner, it removes some of the risk from cloud computing by allowing anyone to run their own hosting services. 

It doesn’t hurt Opera that they’ve found a hail-mary pass for desktop software to remain relevant in the age of the “software as utility” philosophy of cloud computing… by essentially providing a desktop app that turns your desktop into a cloud computing platform. 

Additionally, although I don’t hold out much hope for it, it may increase demand for more uploading capacity for home users.  AT&T DSL, for example, maxes out at 768kbps upload speed – over three hours to upload a single gigabyte of information. There’s been little complaint about this because most people care more about download speeds than upload speeds – with their own hosting services however, people might be more likely to notice, and care, about what speed they can access their home computer from work, or their friends or colleagues can access their files.  That may lead to increased upload capacity provisioning. 

Ultimately, I’m psyched about Opera Unite as a desktop user, but in the trenches of IT, I’d want to make sure I had a way to track this traffic and see if it affects network performance in a meaningful way.  It may be nothing but a flash in the pan, but if it does catch on, I’d rather err on the side of caution.