Teknovis

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

Happy New Year everybody!

I decided to begin 2009 with a humorous post about the buzzwords of 2008 according to The New York Times. The technology sector is normally busting with new buzzwords, so it is interesting to see what buzzwords have main it mainstream!

I think that my favourite buzzword is photobombing, and it means

Intentionally inserting oneself as an unwelcome subject in the background of someone else’s photograph.

Perhaps the most ridicules buzzword is longphoto, which means

A video of 90 seconds or less. Used by the photo-sharing Web site Flickr, which began permitting videos this year.

I do not understand what was wrong with short video!

It is interesting that most of the buzzwords are related to either the US election or the economy.

The full article with all of the buzzwords is The Buzzwords of 2008.

Tags: Buzzword, US Election 2008