Cloud Computing circa 2012

Fast forward five (5) years

At the beginning of 2012, things have changed in the Cloud land. Amazon's strategy of offering Cloud Computing for a rental fee turns into a viable business. More importantly, being offered as an utility, it has become the dominant and de facto public Cloud of today.

MSP Players (Newbies)

Of the Cloud MSP companies, Google and Salesforce.com are worth noting.

For Google, it is interesting to note that while it attempted to offer an alternate solution to Amazon through Google Engine, it never quite caught on. Some have cited Google's insistence on using Python and other tools that are already supported by its infrastructure whereas Amazon let's install whatever you want for a fee. I do think there is also the fear that Google being seen as an engineering house as oppose to Amazon as a retail outfit is likely to be "inspired" and offer a similar product when a Cloud solution has turned out to be successful on the Google platform.

Salesforce.com, on the other hand, stayed focused on what they do. And, in the spirit of MSP, open up a set of API and created platforms for other vendors to participate in their eco-system.

Incumbents

I can only assume that Rackspace was shocked to find one of the biggest online retailer has decided to invade its business. On the other hand, one also has to give Rackspace credit for coming up with its OpenStack solution that has garnered quite a bit of marketing momentum.

For VMware, Cisco, and EMC, the answer is VCE where an integrated solution with VM, servers, switches, and storage from these companies are ready for the users.

Cloud Computing circa 2006

The newbies

In the beginning, there are data centers run by Amazon who need the capacity to handle the rush of Cyber Monday. Google, Salesforce.com, Netflix, and Facebook too are busy tuning their data centers to their own needs.

Dropbox, who will build on Amazon's Cloud infrastructure, is but a glimmer in the founder's eye and won't get started until 2007

The incumbents

VMWare, Cisco, and EMC are busy minding their enterprise business. Rackspace too focuses on providing fanatical support to enterprise users.

Blame it on EC2

Then, somebody at Amazon come to the idea that maybe it would be nice to monetize the "excess" data center capacity for most of the year outside of the Cyber Monday rush. So, the experiment, aka beta, of renting out computing resources from existing data center through services like EC2 and S3 were born.

The mad scramble for Cloud Computing thus have begun.