Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Amazon and Utility Computing

Fascinating article here about Amazon's new bet on utility computing. Jeff Bezos is now going to sell computing power and storage to companies looking to access these resources over the web. Utility computing (or Cloud computing) is nothing new. Sun Microsystems launched its own hosted services based on N1, nearly 3 years ago. What is interesting in this announcement, is that Amazon has been able to integrate computing power, storage, network and provisioning software and offer it as a service while other companies are only starting to implement or talk about convergent IT infrastructure. I'm not sure if this is going to skip one adoption cycle but if Amazon (and other large companies or service providers) is going to be successful, this is going to upend the IT industry in a very significant way. I'm always wary of believing in quick adoption rates and this is going to take time. The route to utility and cloud computing will need more salesforce.com companies first before a move to a hosted converged infrastructure. As any platforms, you need developers to make it meaningful.