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.
