How many companies, large and small, do you know that rely on the Internet?
Some people may have never heard of the term "Cloud Computing". It refers to "a computation or storage offered as a service supported by a pool of distributed computing resources, also known as utility computing or grid computing". But if you have heard of the term, you probably disagree with this description.
Many people think that Cloud Computing refers to online services such as SalesForce.com and Google AdWords. They are not wrong. The term has only really been around since 2007. It isn't surprising that some of the brands that appear on the search "Cloud Computing" include Sun, Salesforce.com, IBM and Amazon.
These brands made the term popular or placed themselves strategically under this search. Either way, if I could invest in this term right now I would. There is a massive amount of advertising and research money being spent on the term. There are about 110 research articles on BusinessWeek's Business Exchange Cloud Computing research topic. The Cloud Computing Journal offers a glimpse into the world of defining Cloud Computing through it's attack on McKinsey and Co's controversial study.
Who will benefit from Cloud Computing and is it a fad?
No it isn't a fad, it is what the internet always promised to be. The rise and fall of the internet in late nineties and eary 2000 has not been forgotten. Some of the businesses that lost money during the crash are the same ones re-investing in SaaS (Software as a Service) and cloud computing.
The interesting trend here is that Cloud Computing has stolen SaaS's meaning and the techie's are not happy. What we need to realise is that small and medium businesses don't have time to research the semantics. SME's don't have Gartner accounts. They have IT costs that are killing them. They want to pay less for IT and get more. Enter Cloud computing.
Adrian Otto wrote: In response to:
"What's unclear is whether they may develop some Drizzle-related functionality that they will then not release as open source and just rent out to Rackspace hosting customers...that would be a way for them to differentiate themselves from competitors and GPLv2 would in principle allow this."
Rackspace has no plans to develop parts of Drizzle that are not in the open domain. I imagine Rackspace specific things like how it may integrate with our internal billing system may not be useful to the open community, and would not be developed by the open source group. Any features...
Mar. 15, 2010 02:54 PM EDT
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