...the Live Mesh middleware, but has yet to produce a coherent cross-company strategy. Of all the cloud companies, it has the most to lose from any move away from client-based computing.
IBM is another company with a comprehensive but not entirely defined cloud strategy. October saw a bunch of new products and services, including 'Bluehouse', a web-based social-networking and collaboration service designed for business.
Hoping to forge another step ahead in November, IBM launched a validation program intended to increase the company's influence in the cloud-computing arena. Using IBM's program, businesses could evaluate the reliability of cloud-based applications and services from any provider.
Compelling reasons
While IBM was making clear that it takes the cloud very seriously indeed, its major competitor was more circumspect. At HP's major software conference in Berlin in December, the head of HP software, Tom Hogan, said the cloud was not the answer to all problems. However, he acknowledged it was "a real paradigm shift", and said there are compelling reasons to deploy services over the cloud.
Meanwhile, Hogan said the company had been working hard on a cloud strategy which, attendees were told, was tied up in the company HP had bought for $13.9bn: EDS.
HP bought EDS in order to get on equal terms with IBM Global Services in the crucial services market, but the company had not been entirely clear what its strategy would be. In Berlin, executives pointed to EDS an answer not just to its current services requirements, but to future ones as well, driven by the move to the software- and services-based cloud. EDS has the datacentres HP now needs.
According to Tony Lock, programme director and analyst at Freeform Dynamics, and someone who knows quite a lot about the cloud having "followed Salesforce.com for eight years", the cloud has become synonymous with SaaS. "It fits in well with some of things that are uppermost in the minds of IT people, such as saving money and working more efficiently," he said.
That meant "using what you have and making it work better", Lock said. "Look around IT departments and you see a lot of over capacity. There are underused systems and storage everywhere, but now they can take that and use it for SaaS."
The problem for smaller companies was the loss of control over the data with cloud services, he said. "You will be running applications on somebody else's system. Large companies are much more comfortable with that than small companies."
Legal considerations
There are other, more serious complications, Lock said. "In certain parts of Europe, including the EU, you are not allowed to let data and applications go outside the EU. I know for a fact that some people are running applications illegally becuase they don't realise that. That is not an issue at the moment, but it could become one as cloud vendors find they have to run different applications in different areas."
As Gartner found out in the survey, around the world companies are at every stage of the cloud, from not thinking about it at all to implementing it as quickly as they can as they follow the trailblazers such as Salesforece.com and Google.
In 2009 we can expect to read a lot more about the cloud, but if the analysts are to be believed, you don't have to rush to implement it. A cannier view will be to watch the numbers, filter the hype, ask hard questions and be ready to move.
