To enrich the discussion and enhance your knowledge about clouds, I digged out an comprehensive chart, showing all the different types of clouds. Really impressive.

<TYPES OF CLOUDS>

A very interesting company these days seems to be Elastra <HOMEPAGE>. They are evangelists of a new approach to so called ‘Elastic Computing’ which might be the ‘next generation in IT infrastructure‘. What in the beginning seems to be a very ambitious idea, is well presented and well documented and seems to make sense in many respects. My understanding after a first look is, that they basically of tool set, called the ‘Elastra Cloud Server On Demand‘ sitting on top of a generic cloud provider like e.g. Amazon EC2. Utilizing the ‘Elastic Computing Markup Language‘ (ECML) and the ‘Elastic Deployment Markup Language‘ (EDML) to have a structured description of cloud environments they want to revolutionize design, deployment, management and especially the automation of cloud computing solutions, including new pricing models and much more.

If one wants to dig into details, navigate to their smoothly designed products page <HERE> and have a look in the Whitepapers to learn something about clouds and their constraints. Or read this Grid Today article <HERE>.

I will watch them closely.

Roland

Ever thought about the relationship of Software-as-a-Service and Cloud computing? Some say, cloud computing is a evolution of SaaS, which from my perspective is not true. As far as my research goes, both developments aim at the same goal – to make computing services available on-demand:

• No need for hardware and software on premise
• Reduced efforts for administration and governance
• No idle hardware consuming electricity

While Software-as-a-Service covers the application part, cloud computing is more about the hardware topics covering cpu, storage and network. I see both as the two extremes with several other buzzy things in between like Platform-as-a-Service, Mash-Ups and Next-Generation-Hosting. The baseline seems to be quite clear and the multitude of offerings is immense. So no one needs to question Gartner top ten predictions for IT organization <LINK> earlier this year. One question from my side is: Isn’t this a little bit too conservative? Is this only true for IT-organizations? Doesn’t other industries have margin pressure as well?

Especially predictions No 4

By 2012, at least one-third of business application software spending will be as service subscription instead of as product license.[...]

and No 5

By 2011, early technology adopters will forgo capital expenditures and instead purchase 40 per cent of their IT infrastructure as a service.[...]

are really compelling – just image the market size we are talking about….

Just to give you some brainfood: Salesforce meets GoogleApps

Roland