Sky’s the limit

CLOUD COMPUTING has been touted as a revolution in the way computer applications are developed and delivered. The technology refers to computer programs, or parts of them, sitting in “the cloud” that users access over the Internet as services. Google Apps is a good example, providing a word processor, spreadsheet application and other programs that can be used in your web browser. Microsoft is also targeting the cloud market and recently unveiled its Windows Azure product, a platform for cloud computing.

One of the advantages of cloud computing for business is that it allows for capital expenditure on software to be replaced with an operational expense. You simply rent application services from a cloud-computing provider instead of buying licences outright. That allows the company to focus on using the application without having to worry about maintaining server hardware or keeping software up to date.

Microsoft says Azure is a software and services platform that’s a key part of its strategy to lessen its emphasis on desktop software and shift more resources to web-based offerings that can match Google’s growing portfolio of online products. That will be a highly contested field and pits Microsoft firmly against Google.

To ensure flexibility for customers in the way they implement and use software, Microsoft has developed a model called “Software Plus Services”. It allows for a combination of locally hosted applications and those that live in the cloud.

“There’s a notion out there that all technology will be sucked up into this thing called the ‘cloud’ that will virtually replace all other technology or render it irrelevant,” says Dave Ives, who heads the Developer & Platform Evangelism Group at Microsoft SA. “The reality is the cloud only complements existing technology and provides people with flexibility and another way of doing things. Our intent with the Azure services platform is to extend Microsoft’s platform seamlessly out to the cloud so customers don’t have to choose or deal with silos of web-based information. Services are here to stay – but software isn’t by any means dead.”

Other companies targeting the cloud computing sector include Salesforce, a provider of customer relationship management (CRM) application solutions, and in the platform game Amazon, the world’s leading online retailer, has become a major services provider via its Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings.

While both players (along with Google and Microsoft) will dominate the short term, IBM, Intel and countless other technology vendors have solutions either in play or coming soon that will further broaden the market.

A challenge for any provider of cloud computing services will be to convince that market it can be trusted with sensitive data. For that reason some companies agree to use cloud-computing services but continue to store actual data on local systems, where it’s perceived to be safer.

While competing with the likes of Google in cloud applications, Microsoft as a platform company may well corner a large percentage of the services market with its Azure.

Cloud computing discussion

Finweek