GigaOM’s Derreck Harris asks whether Facebook might be the next big enterprise software vendor. Why isn’t it crazy? Well, look at Amazon.com.

Amazon.com is and was an e-commerce giant. But in 2006, it decided to capitalize on its computing infrastructure. Now it’s become practically synonymous with the cloud. Leading websites like Reddit run on it, as do platform-as-a-services like Heroku and Engine Yard. When Netflix migrated its operations, it chose Amazon Web Services.

Amazon.com as a leading cloud hosting provider seemed just as unlikely in 2005 as Facebook as an enterprise vendor does today. If you want another example of a consumer company going enterprise, look at Google. The company started out as a search/advertising company. Now it has Google Apps and the new Cloud Services line.

Harris points out Facebook’s expertise in Apache Hadoop and its homegrown IT management tools like Kobold, a configuration, provisioning and testing tool.

Services Angle

ServicesAngle editor Alex Williams has a forthcoming post about Hadoop, including the human costs of creating and maintaining Hadoop clusters. Hadoop lets you solve massive computational problems with commodity hardware – but how many people know how to work with it? Facebook is in a unique position to provide some interesting services regarding Hadoop and data centers.

Apache Cassandra was created at Facebook, and now DataStax is dedicated to commercializing it. Former Facebook employee Jeff Hammerbacher co-founded Cloudera to commercialize Hadoop, and hired Hadoop creator Doug Cutting. Yahoo funded much of the development of Hadoop and employed Cutting before he went to Cloudera. HortonWorks is a Yahoo spin-off company.

So it would be easy to see a Facebook spin-off dedicated to big data or data center operations. But what about Facebook itself selling software and services? Amazon.com and Google have already paved the way for Facebook to build its own enterprise business.