In the keynote at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas, Gartner VP Thomas Bittman predicted that ‘cloud computing will eventually support thousands of specialized providers, with services being put together like Lego blocks’ <READHERE>. My guess is that Mr. Bittman tried to say, that cloud computing will intrinsically tied to Saas. But is that true? Let’s first discuss what the point with cloud computing is. Is it just a new buzzword for modern service providers with very flexible provisioning features and/or highly distributed high capacity datacenters? Or is it a new computing paradigm, enabling users to write applications capable dealing with thousand times higher computing capacity, like Google asks students promoting their cloudy mindset <HERE>. So whats the point?

The close relationship between Clouds and SOA is common sense (see interview with IBM Autonomics director <HERE>). That may be the reason, why all big IT vendors like IBM, HP, Microsoft, Novell and thelike  have broadened their portfolios in the past few years and will be able to not only offer platforms for building service enabled applications, but are also providing/buying technology for automating data center management and provisioning.

So managing clouds is the new Infrastructure paradigm (vs. on-premise or ’serverhugging’), while SOA might be the new application development paradigm (vs. ERP dinosaurs)? If it was that simple, then we probably will have thousands of providers, providing 2nd Tier service offerings and several large scale 1st Tier infrastructure providers offering cheap and enormous computing power.

Even if I haven’t looked into topics like security or IAM, the paradigm shift may be a long way, thinking of todays heterogenous computing landscape. Key to success might be the possibility to be able to provision, manage and support large scale (utility) systems. For that reasons I’m really glad to work in the interesting area of ITSM, BSM and Automation <RELATED_READING>, which definitly will be the key to the future.

Google is buying land – obviously to build datacenters. E. g. 1000 acres in Iowa <LINK> and 800 acres in Oklahoma <LINK>. How many square-feet are the data-centers supposed have? What’s your guess? I’m sure that they don’t need these sites to just install racks and some modern cooling facility.

These chunks of land would be enought to build a Google theme park or – to be more on topic – addressing the issue of rising power costs, to install a nuclear power station. This would provide kind of clean energy, but would not be very sexy, looking a the high risks implied.

So the only purpose for these sites with big green Google will be to build modern high efficient datacenters and also highly modern power plants utilizing renewable energy. Google already invests in companies developing such technologies, as you can read on Googles Website in an article titled “powering a clean enery revolution” <HERE>.

Now we will be able to understand the meaning of “grid computing”.

What do you think?

Commodity hardware vs. high tech. This is seems to be the baseline. While Google has shown that commodity hardware using the ‘right’ OS and architecture is able to outperform everything else, IBM entered the battlefield about six months ago <ARTICLE_READWRITEWEB>. They even teamed up with google to <PRESSRELEASE_IBM> to provide cloud developement facilities to US universities. But what’s IBMs goal? Just to be on the field? No. IBM has several handicaps compared to Google. They have a long history and many customers putting pressure on them, so It’s not just “here’s our new cloud plattform – just use and pay”. Instead IBM has a long track record in developing and selling hardware from a to z – or was it System i to System z , so they want to take their customer base with them to the new age. While ‘newcomers’ like Google and Amazon attract young companies and early adopters, traditional player like IBM need to take care of corporate customers and the masses. And maybe they are working on preparing the public for several years now with their “On-Demand-Computing” campaign? Who knows?

So probably, there will not be a big war, It’s more like sharing the cake.

Roland