From the Editors: Today's cloud forecast: sunny



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June 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 2)
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.



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

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