Is IT of the Future Firmly Rooted in the 'Cloud'?
Date : 25 Sep 2008 Category : Technology
NewsFactor NetworkUpstart Google and old-line IBM are forging an alliance to alloy their pioneering traditions in software and hardware in the cause of revolutionizing the acquisition and delivery of information technology. Gartner, which has studied and issued technical notes on the state of the concept, defines cloud computing as "a style of computing where massively scalable IT-enabled capabilities are delivered 'as a service' to external customers using Internet technologies." Basically, the hardware is pooled together and shared by all.
Microsoft, widely viewed as an arch competitor to both Google and IBM, has also joined the cause with systems for bringing cloud computing to the desktop. Addressing a technical audience last June, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates outlined his vision of applying massive web-based computing power to enterprise software as a service: "We're taking everything we do at the server level, and saying that we will have a service that mirrors that exactly. . . For SQL, we'll have SQL Server Data Services, and so you can connect up, build the database. It will be hosted in our cloud with the big, big data center, and geo-distributed automatically. Today we have, in our data center, many hundreds of thousands of servers, and in the future we'll have many millions of those servers." This lets Microsoft become "very radical" in thinking about the kinds of software products it can offer, Gates adds.
Already Google, IBM, and Amazon are doing just that. "The robust computing platform that has been built and refined over the years by Amazon is now available to anyone, anywhere, who has access to the Internet," is how...