TechPulse 360

MR Rangaswami, host, Cloud Summit Executive conference

No doubt, cloud computing is the latest buzz word in Silicon Valley.

It’s been so over-hyped to a point that anything that is on-line is now beeing called a cloud computing service.

Flickr, Google, Youtube… are cloud services for the consumer. EC2 is Amazon’s cloud used essentially by startups and small and medium businesses. EMC, HP, Microsoft, Sun… are all building their own clouds!

So what is cloud computing? Is it real?

“At this event we asked ourselves, is cloud computing, software as a service (Saas) with lipstick? I think cloud and Saas have fundamental differences. For example, with cloud computing you can virtually buy compute power and storage. Saas is application-driven. Cloud is much broader than that. And I think in these tough economic times, even though cloud computing is a new buzz word, it has to deliver value not hype. And companies are going to buy into cloud computing architecture and solutions if there’s a specific business reason and value”, explained Rangaswami, the host of the Cloud Summit Executive conference.

Cloud computing: enterprise to wait-and-see

With cloud solutions emerging like Amazon or Google App Engine, Rangaswami sees a clear market bifurcation where smaller companies are early adopters of those “public” clouds, while large enterprises are waiting on the sideline.

Rangaswami also expects a slew of startups to create a layer of software, on top of those clouds, to make it easy for companies to move into these public infrastructures and manage their applications.

“We noticed that Fortune 500 companies are confortable waiting for the incumbent vendors to offer them cloud solutions. Because these large enterprises have massive infrastructure and very critical applications and they are quite hesitant to move to a quite un-tested approach. On the other hand, smaller and medium businesses need solutions to help them with business today and they don’t have much of a legacy set of applications and they’re much more agressive in adopting new technologies. So you’ll see cloud making its entrance into the SMB market and finding adoption there. And eventually I think the big companies will also see the light and join the bandwagon”.