Is Cloud computing really new
Posted by sambasiva on July 17, 2011
Consider this quote from Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle.
“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion.”
This was in 2008.
Fast forward to 2010. At the OpenWorld conference this year, Oracle announces :
“World’s Best Foundation for Cloud Computing: Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is the world’s first and only integrated cloud machine—hardware and software engineered together to provide a “cloud in a box”. “
So, is cloud computing really new ?
The answer I believe is Marketing meets technological advances.
The concept of delivering software on tap (Software as a service – SaaS) is not new. While free internet based services like e-mail have been around forever, the concept of charging ‘per seat’ or ‘per account’ based charges for applications delivered over the web have proliferated quite a bit in the last decade.
Also not new is the concept of providing centralized computing resources – either Raw virtualized infrastructure (Infrastructure as a service – IaaS) or a stack ready to take applications (Platform as a service – PaaS). IT departments in large corporations will tell you they are already doing this. A lot of IT departments charge back the business based on CPU minutes and storage used – i.e pay per drink.
So, whats changed for cloud computing to become so popular – I believe it is the proverbial tipping point that is the combination of how ubiquitous SaaS, IaaS or PaaS have become and the fact that these are being provided on a computing scale that is unprecedented with the promise of instant limitless expansion. This combination was ripe for going mainstream as a concept and as Larry Ellison said so eloquently put it, the computer industry is not the one to miss a trick.
