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From the Editors: Today's cloud forecast: sunny


By SD Times News Team
June 15, 2008 — 
Cloud computing is becoming so popular as a discussion topic that TV weathercasters may suffer a shortage of cloud graphics for their maps. All the best ones will be taken by technology marketing materials.

As demand for computing capacity grows, but funding to add capacity shrinks, enterprises seek alternatives. The cloud premise promises that instead of running their own data centers, businesses can plug into someone else’s massive infrastructure—like Amazon’s or Google’s. Why rent when you can buy?

Google was the latest to put its head in the clouds, officially launching its App Engine service at the Google I/O conference last month. Users can develop a software application for free and host it for free on Google’s IT infrastructure, unless it needs more than 500MB of storage or enjoys more than 5 million page views a month; then hosting will cost money. As an indication of interest in cloud computing, Google initially sought to limit use of App Engine to 10,000, just to be able to manage the fledgling program, but quickly accumulated a waiting list of 150,000. It relented and invited all comers to sign up.

Google certainly is not alone. Amazon.com was one of the first, selling compute time along with its books, CDs, digital cameras and other merchandise through its Elastic Compute Cloud service. The much smaller Salesforce.com, which began by hosting sales force automation applications over the Internet, launched Force.com earlier this year to help develop and host applications in its cloud.

A Yankee Group research report identified 27 companies as vendors of one kind or another in the cloud computing space. That’s a lot of cloud graphics your local TV weatherman won’t be able to use.

Cloud computing is prompting other companies to develop related services. Informatica, which helps businesses organize, secure and extract value from data, was expected to launch a cloud-related service at a user conference held June 3 in Las Vegas. The cloud will just be one more place where a company keeps its data. An Informatica media briefing slide presentation used up 10 cloud graphics. And that’s just one company.

And cloud computing is not just for startups without the money to build their own data center. Enterprises are the No. 1 user of cloud computing services, according to Yankee. They might not use it for mission-critical production applications, but they are going to the cloud to run certain IT projects.

Given the activity on the cloud computing front and the participation of players like Amazon and Google, the forecast seems downright sunny.

Robert Mullins


Snapshots of history

As the newspaper of record for the software development industry, SD Times has seen a lot of changes since its launch in 2000. Our very first issue coincided with Sun’s release of Java 2 Micro Edition. We’ve chronicled the launch of the .NET Framework, the rise of multicore processing, the foundation of Eclipse and the whole sordid SCO affair. When you look back over the past 200 issues of the newspaper, there’s a lot of history.

History wouldn’t be history, of course, without the meteoric rise and tragic fall of its players. Thus, the saga of WebGain, encapsulated within the pages of SD Times. Technology empires have been born, flourished and been acquired, often by the voracious IBM and Oracle. The old has become new again as Apple rose like the Phoenix from the ashes. The new has challenged the old as Google came from nowhere to trouble the mighty Microsoft.

A look back at the past 200 issues of SD Times is on pages 20–21. Some of the news we’ve covered seems so unimportant now: Who really cares now about the XML alliance formed by eXcelon and CSI USA? Other trends were vital, such as the creation of UML 2.0 and the struggle to dominate server virtualization.

We hope you enjoy our retrospective as much as we enjoyed creating it.

Alan Zeichick


Related Search Term(s): Cloud computing, Google, Salesforce.com


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