The hype around cloud computing is enormous with claims of cutting operational costs by at least 90 percent. Cloud platforms are perceived today as ““plug in play” for software development.

It is no wonder that many businesses are branding themselves as delivering cloud computing services and products. Whether cloud computing will be ever able to make good on such hype is uncertain. Nevertheless, there is a tremendous benefit to cloud computing. The two major benefits are ease-of-use and cost-effectiveness.

Cloud computing is a general term that incorporates software as a service (SAAS) with the IT-related capabilities provided “as a service”. Cloud computing has the following characteristics:

  • Ability to increase or decrease capacity on demand
  • Usage meter of only paying for what you use
  • Self-service ability via a GUI or API
  • Elastic scalability with ability to shrink or grow resources as required
  • Network is essential to consume service
The current cloud provider continuum ranges from the platform-as-a-service such as force.com (platform-as-a-service) to supplier types of ecosystems such as Amazon Web Services (infrastructure-as-a-service).

PLAYERS:

Considering that the ticket for state-of-the art data centers is now reaching $500M, cloud computing is an arena for big players. I don’t expect small players to stay competitive for long in this game without the help of the big guys.

The current players are (more to come):

IT INFRASTRUCTURE PROVIDERS (LARGE):

  • Amazon Web Services production-ready cloud offer on the market.
  • Google App Engine a Python only cloud framework
  • Windows Azure the window competitor
  • VMWare the cloud Vservice
  • SalesForces mostly B2B services
IT INFRASTRUCTURE PROVIDERS (MEDIUM):
  • Mosso
  • Flexiscale
  • GoGrid
SOFTWARE VENDORS:
  • Elastra
  • RightScale
  • 3Tera

What is to come in next 12-months?
===========================
In the next 12-months, we will continue to see Cloud enabler technologies and platforms evolve, mature and become more reliable. As the demand for Saas grows, you will see smaller companies taking advantage of pubic clouds as a service while larger companies will begin to take advantage of the paradigm developing private infrastructure clouds with legacy applications. Small and large companies alike will provide more (limited) public facing APIs. The need for better management of goverance of compliance and standards, licenses, security, platform agnostic, monitoring, deployment and SLAs will emerge.