Cloud Computing for SMBs

John Willis's Blog

I was reading a recent post about the Merrill Lynch’s research note titled “The Cloud Wars: $100+ billion at stake” and it started me thinking about the cloud vs. IT infrastructure question again. As the cloud-o-sphere tries to define this “cloud” thing, myself included, it seems like the list of who is a cloud just keeps getting longer and longer. I originally thought the Forrester 11 list was a little to long when it included SalesForce.com and Akamai as cloud providers. The general consensus seems to be, if you are a SaaS, PaaS, or a IaaS you are probably a cloud and this makes the list even longer.

Is Guitar Hero a Cloud?

So, today when I read that Merrill Lynch added Activision and Digital Reality to the cloud, it becomes clearer to me we may have met the “All’s Fair” saturation point. If you want to be a cloud just say you are a cloud. In fact if you are a vendor and you don’t figure out a way to call yourself a cloud you will probably be at a competitive disadvantage. In the late 1980’s there was a similar phenomenon with “Client Server”. Just when everything in IT was being called “client server” the term seemed mysteriously vanished from the IT lexicon.

Is World of Warcraft a Cloud?

Are MMORPGs and Virtual Worlds Clouds? Aren’t we basically saying that almost everything that provides a service is a cloud? Or is a cloud just all the IT infrastructure minus the hardware?

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