Google of course has a vested interest in this game, but it’s clear they have a point. The power of the PC is moving to the cloud for all of the heavy lifting. Buying ever more powerful equipment is simply unnecessary. The enterprise can do much of its computing in the cloud, and with Apple’s latest moves the consumer will soon find media there as well.

So now that the cloud is fully established for both consumers and enterprises alike, it’s just a matter of time before the old desktop PC goes the way of the dinosaur.

TripZipr turned to Model Metrics to migrate its existing application from a managed services provider to Amazon Web Services. The AWS solution, which runs in the Amazon Elastic Compute (EC2) cloud, prepares TripZipr for future growth and expands its capacity.

<Link to press release>

I hate cloud computing. There, I said it. OK, maybe it’s not cloud computing I hate, it’s the buzz and hype associated with the term.

Whenever a technology acquires a sexy new term, companies that have nothing to do with it use the term in order to be associated with being hip or cool. This concept is on painful exhibit with HD Sunglasses. You mean to tell me I’ve been seeing everything in VHS-quality my whole life and all I needed was sunglasses to get my 1080p? Ridiculous, right?

And just like that, a term that used to have meaning becomes diluted, and people who aren’t early adopters become disillusioned.

Gartner has recognized this trend with cloud computing, calling the hype "deafening." This is a real problem for IT and business professionals alike who want to learn what cloud computing is and what it can do for their business. The problem is in the signal to noise ratio. Too much BS, not enough substance.

My message to people who are legitimately trying to learn is this: as someone whose career has always been in tech, cloud computing is very real. Organizations who do not embrace the technology are going to get steamrolled by those who do. If you’re not moving forward you’re getting passed - that is the way of business.

Cloud computing is by and large cheaper than on-premise applications, adapts more quickly to the needs of your business, and is far more extensible than traditional apps. It is not the answer for everything, but it can make your business much more nimble.

<Link to press release> 

1) There Will be Another Outage, and No One Will Panic
In 2009 there were two significant outages of Google’s Gmail service, which rendered it unavailable temporarily. The most interesting part of the story is that the outages are so rare that they were deemed newsworthy by the mainstream media. In 2010 there will likely be an outage of another major Cloud Computing vendor, and the reactions in the media will be the same. It will be covered broadly for 2 reasons:

• Outages are very rare
• Critics and IT luddites are looking for a story to keep the business side off of their backs

Either way, vendors have their best and brightest working to ensure that they don’t happen, and if they do happen they will be short-lived and you won’t even have to think about it. The problem fixes itself.

2) Google Enterprise Applications Will Gain Large Acceptance
In 2009 Google gained significant traction in the market with its Enterprise Apps (Gmail, Docs, Calendar) and in 2010 that trend will only accelerate. Enterprises spend approximately $17b annually on Microsoft Office, and Google’s pricing model combined with its flexibility mean Microsoft could be in trouble. Organizations are always looking for ways to save money, and this is an easy one.

3) Consolidation of Cloud Computing Vendors The big players in cloud computing (Salesforce, Google, Amazon Web Services) have all built good products with basic functionality, and rely on external players to augment them. They focus on what they do best, and outsource the rest.

As many of these augmentations become more mature and become more native to the platforms, look to see the smaller companies to get swallowed up. This creates more value for the big vendors while limiting their exposure to development risk, and increases their internal talent pools.

Combine the business reasons for acquisitions with the ongoing improvements capital markets, and consolidations should make a big comeback this year.

4) "Young" Vendors Will See Explosive Growth
As more parts of the various cloud computing platforms are further opened up for development, expect to see fresh young startups blossoming to fill business requirements. I also fully expect to see our company’s offerings around sales, service, and call centers to grow for these exact reasons.

5) Cloud Computing’s Growth Accelerates
The economic turmoil has been going for over 2 years now, and it appears we are in a new normal. This environment has forced companies to cut costs and run leaner than in previous years. With IT budgets either shrinking or headcount being reduced, it is no longer optional to optimize staff’s time. Organizations do not want to waste resources on maintaining email servers or other on-premise applications when on-demand applications in the cloud make more sense financially.

Did you know the federal government spends over $75B annually on IT? With that number in mind, you can imagine the enormous amount of manpower it takes to choose, customize, build, deploy, and maintain separate instances of applications to run the government’s operations. I cannot imagine a more perfect environment to deploy cloud computing, and it is apparent that the President “gets it” too.

In keeping with his initiative for lowering the costs of running government, the White House this year launched apps.gov, an online repository for federal agencies to explore and purchase cloud-based IT services. So instead of having to individually seek out vendors, government agencies now have a one-stop shop to get most of what they’re looking for. And guess what – salesforce.com and Google are featured vendors.  

In a year of giant bailouts, it’s about time the taxpayer got a break from politicians, except this time it’s technology that’s doing all the heavy lifting.

You know the cloud computing model has hit it big when the second-largest city in the United States makes the switch. Los Angeles had previously been running Novell’s Groupwise (ouch!) and one can imagine that with the economic downturn drastic cost-cutting measures had to be made. This year they made the move to use Gmail for 30,000 city employees along with Google Docs. So instead of wasting IT resources to maintain an email server, they can now deploy those resources to initiatives that provide more value for the city.

The case for cloud computing was so clear that the LA City Council voted unanimously. Microsoft sent their big guns in to try and derail the Google move, but to no avail. Cloud computing has arrived in major fashion, and it’s become quite clear that vendors must either compete in that arena or they are in trouble.

In February, Google made the news somewhat ignominiously when it’s Gmail service was unavailable for several hours, and then again in September. Our own Reid Carlberg’s response to the issue garnered much interest on sites like Reddit and Stumbleupon: “I don’t care.” 

While his subject line was obviously written for effect, his reasoning is absolutely sound:

• Outages of Gmail are extremely rare
• Their support teams often know about a problem before you do
• You don’t need to buy additional maintenance to fix the problem
• Nobody lost any data

We’re pretty sure you’ve heard these themes before from marketing departments espousing the benefits of cloud computing (guilty!), but this is a prime example of why it works so well.

Anyone who has worked in an enterprise email environment managed by Microsoft Exchange, Novell, Lotus or any of the other major players has seen their work email unavailable but at a much higher frequency than Google. The odds of getting information about those outages from your IT was like pulling teeth, because they don’t want egg on their face.

Switching our corporate email to Gmail not only saved us a large amount of money each year, it has provided rock-solid reliability and a level of support that can’t be found anywhere else. Gmail rocks, plain and simple. 

If ever there was a ringing endorsement for the cloud computing model, it’s when the two 800-lb gorillas of computing join the game. What was considered a joke to most just 10 years ago became a very serious battle for cloud supremacy when Microsoft and IBM announced their entrance.

Microsoft is well known in business circles for its Office and server applications, but hasn’t done much in cloud computing. After a few secretive years of development under the code name Red Dog, Microsoft pulled the covers off of the finished product, “Windows Azure.” 

Much of the same can be said of IBM. Big Blue has been historically known for providing mainframes, servers, and data centers for large enterprises to run their businesses on, but didn’t have much in the way of a platform as a service. That’s now changed with IBM’s large push into cloud computing.

Amazon’s Web Services have been getting better and better, but typically by incremental amounts. Up until now, it’s been a slow trickle of improvements to a solid suite of offerings. Cheap storage, cheap computing power, cheap access to PCI compliance, etc.

This new offering however, may truly be a game-changer for their web services division. Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud lets companies create their own isolated set of EC2 instances and connect them to their own existing IT infrastructure through a VPN connection.

What does all that mumbo-jumbo mean to the business management people? Simple. Now you can augment your IT’s infrastructure without huge capital expenditures. EC2 already runs Windows Server 2008, SQL Server, Oracle Database 11g, IBM DB2, IBM Websphere and many more.

Amazon’s immensely powerful infrastructure is available as a service at prices that will make you wonder if you should bother with your own hardware anymore.