It seems that it is impossible to read a technology news web site these days without reading at least one cloud computing article! I still remain sceptical that cloud computing will be the saviour that it is being hyped-up to be! However, I do think that it will have a number of business areas where it will succeed.
I read an interesting article earlier this month about a partnership between IBM and Juniper that is intended to bring them both into the cloud computing market. Strategically I think that this partnership makes sense, and both companies will bring significant expertise to it. So it will be interesting to see what they do next!
Perhaps the most interesting statement in the article was:
With cloud computing possibly representing a $42 billion market by 2012, …
I love these types of market value estimations, because they seem to be as accurate as lottery predictions!
The full article is IBM And Juniper Networks Hoping To Gain Cloud Computing Market Share.
Tags: IBM, Juniper
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Cloud Computing is certainly a term that I keep hearing more and more about, but yet I am not really sure what it means. I certainly think that it is overused and abused ;) (I am going to resist all cloud related puns in this post!)
More importantly, I am not yet convinced that it will be the solution to as many problems as some people claim. Yes, I think that there are some areas that will benefit greatly from cloud computing, but I do not think that anybody really knows exactly which areas these are yet.
I read a good introduction to cloud computing recently in A crack in the madness of clouds. The author tries to identify the different application areas where cloud computing might make an impact, and he provides examples where possible. The application areas that he identifies are:
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service
- Storage-as-a-Service
- Data-as-a-Service
- Platform-as-a-Service
- Software-as-a-Service
Salesforce is perhaps the most widely known example of a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application. I think that it is quite significant because it started many people using SaaS applications without them actually knowing that they were doing this. I think that one of the dangerous of this has been that people do not realise the disadvantages of these types of applications. However, I think that people will quickly gain a negative perspective as incidents of these SaaS applications becoming unavailable occur more frequently. For example, over 900,000 customers were recently unable to use SalesForce for over an hour according to Salesforce.com outage exposes cloud’s dark linings.
Perhaps it is not surprising then that SalesForce are developing a new form of cloud computing, known as the Service Cloud! The idea of this appears to be to unify in a cloud all of the information that is exchanged with customers using the different interfaces that are supported by a company. For more details about this see Salesforce.com tackles customer service with the Service Cloud.
I wonder will 2009 be a decisive year in the life of cloud computing!
Tags: Buzzword, SaaS, Salesforce
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Amazon has announced the seven finalists in the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge. The idea behind this competition is to encourage start-up companies that base their products on Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure. The seven finalists are:
The main prize for the eventual winner is $50,000 in cash, $50,000 worth of Amazon credits, and a potential investment from Amazon.
Tags: Amazon, Competition, Encoding.com, Knewton, MedCommons, Pixily, Sonian, Yieldex, Zephyr
