Is Your Head in the Clouds this February?
There is no doubt that the term cloud computing has been gaining mass adoption over the past 18 months amongst technology companies, especially the marketing departments. It was never more evident last month as I attended four events over four weeks covering a wide range of all things “cloud related”.
We have gone from Application Service Providers, to Software-as-a-Service and now to Cloud Computing which has gobbled up any and everything that touches web technology. Having worked in the enterprise space over the past 9 years it has been interesting to attend these events and see how things are coming full circle with a whole new cycle of education and hype.
At the TechCrunch Cloud event last week was held at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley home. One of the VC’s on the panel made the comment that he doesn’t look forward to seeing every business plan that comes across his desk have the word Cloud in it, while another panelist said that “cloud is the new .com”. The event provided some moments that made me chuckle as Benioff, on point several times, talked about the “Salesforce Cloud” while bashing Microsoft any chance he could get and Steve Gillmor from TechCrunch declared GMail to be the first Cloud Computing application as he introduced Paul Buchheit from FriendFeed and tech lead of GMail while he was at Google.
The next 18 months will make for an interesting time as the big boys such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Sun, IBM, Yahoo! (who has been pretty quiet so far) continue to invest heavily in data centers and new service offerings.
Amazon is definitely the far and away leader right now but one interesting player to keep an eye on is Rackspace. After launching their Mosso service, acquiring Slice Host and Jungle Disk and subsequently renaming each of them with the Cloud monikor, they are preparing for a big push. Their existing presence in the hosting space and deep levels of support should make for an attractive offering to the Enterprise. More details as Mosso’s website.
For those interested in attending some cloud related events I recomend checking out the Silicon Valley Cloud Meetup. NY folks reading this with cloud fever can hit up the Cloud Computing Expo at the end of this month.
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