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HOME >> OPINIONS

From the Editors: Keep watching the clouds

By SD Times News Team

December 1, 2008 — (Page 1 of 2)
Rapid innovation is under way in cloud computing, with new companies joining the fray seemingly every week. Some are refining existing approaches, some have new ideas and some are “me too.” While it’s good to keep up with the newcomers—and to try out their offerings, where it makes sense—the rapid pace of innovation means it’s too soon for a large-scale adoption. Not only don’t we know which providers will be around for the long term, but we also don’t know which of their many business models and architectures will prove to be successful.

It’s certainly true that first movers have an advantage. But they don’t have all the advantages.

In the early days of the automotive industry, Ford’s Model T was the first vehicle affordable to the masses, and it popularized a new form of transportation. Soon afterward, other car companies followed suit with better components and offered consumers greater choice, while Ford’s design remained largely static. Although it was first out the gate, Ford did not have an insurmountable advantage.

We’re not saying that Amazon’s cloud platform is a Model T. Far from it. But just because the Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud was the first successful cloud offering doesn’t mean it’s the only game in town. Alternatives are cropping up, and they deserve serious attention.

Take Azure. While Microsoft insists that it is a partner—not a competitor—to Amazon, Microsoft has created a full-fledged development platform for cloud services. There’s a lot more work to be done, but Microsoft clearly has the resources to turn Azure into a very robust platform.

The same can be said for Google and its platform. Meanwhile, certain more vertically focused companies, such as Salesforce.com, have resources to cycle into broad-based cloud platform development. Numerous cloud startups are cropping up as well.

This is the time to test the cloud-computing waters at a project level. If everyone had jumped at once at the dawn of the auto industry, we would all still be driving Model Ts.

Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, REST, SOAP, Amazon, Google, Microsoft

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Developers discuss ways to program in cloud environments
Cloud computing is still a relatively new concept, and both small business and enterprises are looking into how to use it to their advantage. One of the biggest questions facing developers is whether or not to use proprietary cloud APIs Read More...

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