Editor's Blog

More clouds in the blue-sky thinking
Friday, August 01, 2008

Technology, outsourcing and services giant IBM is to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create two delivery centres to power the much touted cloud-computing model it believes will be a driving force of future business.

Good news is that the two new datacentres – one in Carolina, and the other in Tokyo – are being designed to be ultra efficient and will recycle or reuse parts of existing facilities. They will join existing cloud centres in Dublin, Beijing and Johannesburg.

“Cloud computing is fundamentally about re-engineering the world’s computing infrastructure, to enable game-changing – even life-changing – applications,” said Willy Chiu, VP IBM High Performance On Demand Solutions. “To IBM, cloud computing is much more than the normal evolution of a datacentre.”

The news comes at the same time as Yahoo, together with chip maker Intel and hardware and services giant Hewlett Packard have announced a collaboration with three universities to develop a cloud computing testbed to help colleges and and vendors design, build and test cloud applications.

The three companies plus the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Steinbuch Centre for Computing of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany plan to build six datacentres to promote arrays of open-source collaborations on a global scale.

This latter project is all very well – if a little late to the party – and it certainly reinforces cloud computing’s traditional association with academia.

But that is the point: more and companies now seem determined to adopt the term ‘cloud computing’ as a synonym for ‘internet-based applications and on-demand services’, to the general bafflement of the wider public (otherwise known as customers).

As regular readers will know from this blog, software as a service (SaaS) vendors such as NetSuite, Salesforce.com and RightNow are serial offenders in this misappropriation of the term, and have been joined by Google and IBM.

Meanwhile, the three-legged dog of Yahoo, plus traditional industry stalwarts HP and Intel clearly view ‘cloud computing’ as still being about the academic open source, peer-to-peer sharing of computing resources and processing power, which is the origin of the term.

So the question remains as to why the industry has elected to use a vague, amorphous, enigmatic phrase to describe SaaS and on-demand applications – an area that is surely better described as ‘Internet-based computing’ or ‘on-demand computing’. Since when have clouds been sexy?

No amount of rewriting Wikipedia entries to claim that cloud computing and SaaS have always been synonymous will alter the fact that, for most of the general services-buying public, ‘cloud computing’ is a baffling and offputting term. Why obfuscate and mystify when the subject ought to be so easy for people to understand?

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