Wednesday, December 30, 2009

An application war is brewing in the cloud

Today's cloud-computing vendors focus on infrastructure, but that won't be the case for long. It can't be. As competing vendors seek to differentiate themselves, they're going to move "up the stack" into applications.

It's like the history of enterprise computing, played out in months and years instead of decades.

Oracle arguably set this strategy in motion when it acquired its way to a complete infrastructure-plus-applications portfolio to lower customer acquisition costs and improve its competitive differentiation for CIOs. IBM and Microsoft also went that route, though to differing degrees and in different ways.

Cloud-computing platform vendors are going to have to do the same thing, except they don't have the luxury of waiting.

It's not enough for cloud vendors to build the infrastructure and pray, "Field of Dreams" style, that customers will come. They won't. Not without applications and a host of other issues worked out for them, not by them.

Even Google, born in the cloud, recognizes this. Instead of forcing government customers into its public cloud, the company is building a dedicated cloud for government organizations in the U.S. Google's reasoning?

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Source:
CNet
By: Matt Asay

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