Posted on Sunday, March 01, 2009 6:23 PM
I watched the TechCrunch Roundtable session last friday about "Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?". The session addressed some interesting questions and was focusing on the issue “Is the cloud really different from the way we work now” and if it’s different, what are the benefits..
One conclusion was: Cloud computing will really change our world (it’s a paradigm shift (the biggest in 20 years) and it’s the next big evolution of the web and the way we use IT as businesses and consumers. The way TechCrunch bring this news: “The Cloud Is The New Dotcom”
One of the topics I liked most where the Background stories from Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO) and Amitabh Srivastava (Corporate VP, Windows Azure). They both told a short story about how their companies started with the Ideas for their ‘Platform as a Service’ products (EC2 and AZURE) and what their primary goals are. Check the second clip to see Werner's answer. And Microsoft Vision we know from Ray Ozzie's PDC 2008 keynote.
In my opinion:
Amazon and Microsoft have the best position for becoming the biggest ”Platform as a Service” companies. SaaS is important too, but the platforms will bring the real innovations.
Our current IT and Web platforms are like DOS (poor interfacing and expensive to deploy) and these ‘Platforms as a Service’ (PaaS) providers will bring us the next Operating Systems. A (Web) OS that works on-demand, has pay-per-use and has extremely scalable computing resources without the need for (internal) IT.
I can’t what to bring the first “Cloud OS” based applications in production...