Cloud Summit Executive: Can anyone define cloud computing?
Last week I attended the Cloud Summit Executive at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, which is a great venue for a computing conference. I went into the conference with only a nebulous idea about cloud computing (pun not intended) and SaaS (Software as a Service), so I was looking forward to getting a clearer idea of what exactly that means.
The chairman of the conference started by saying that he asked 20 people what cloud computing is, and he got 22 different answers. I thought I heard that wrong, but he repeated those numbers later, so I guess some people were either so enthused about cloud computing that they gave two definitions, or they were that confused. In any case, he promised that we’d get a real definition later.
The first speaker showed a scrolling list of companies already “on the cloud.” They went by so fast, but here’s a list of the few I caught: Flickr, Wikipedia, Skype, Gmail, Basecamp, Pandora, digg, and Remember the Milk. It was quite an impressive list which definitely gave the cloud concept more weight. But the speaker still gave a warning about considering the cloud to be the panacea for all enterprises. He reminded us of the time when e-commerce became the big buzzword and people were speculating that soon we wouldn’t have anymore brick and mortar stores, but we see now that wasn’t the case. E-commerce is an important part of business, but it isn’t the only part.
While all this was fascinating, I wasn’t sure I really understood it all since I was still waiting for a definition of cloud computing, but the speaker promised that we’d get it by the end of the day.
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Interop NY 2008: What is SaaS (Software as a Service)?
Hello Webgrrls. More greetings and info from September’s Interop conference.
In this post I will try to break down the following: the meaning of SaaS (Software as a Service) and, briefly PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).
One track of the Interop NY seminars dealt with SaaS, and I thought it would be a valuable complement to the seminars I attended on Cloud Computing, so, there I was. And here we go.
To start, Software as a Service.
An application that is delivered through the SaaS model is typically done over the internet by a third party with no opportunity to bring the application in-house. As a user/subscriber, you use that provider’s application.
The other key to all SaaS is a variable, pay-as-you-go pricing structure, or on-demand pricing, a 21st century morph of just-in-time inventory strategies. Salesforce.com, Netsuite, and similar CRM and eCommerce applications come to mind. SaaS solutions increasingly offer real time analytics and self-provisioned toolkits, and have gained both traction and credibility in areas like accounting software, financial applications and supply chain management. Continue Reading “Interop NY 2008: What is SaaS (Software as a Service)?”
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Interop NY 2008: What is Cloud Computing?
In early September, Nelly Yusupova offered a couple of full conference passes to the Interop New York conference, held at the Javits Center from September 15-19. I applied and as luck would have it, I won a free pass!
Interop NY was essentially a conference for IT people—those dealing with the nuts and bolts of application development and delivery, infrastructure development and network support. In short, it was a place for Really Smart People.
I am a freelance web designer and photographer and to tell you the truth, I was a bit intimidated and overwhelmed at how technical the conference was but decided to rise to the challenge. It was a great opportunity to learn something new.
So, two weeks before and all during the conference, I dug in and began a frenzy of self-education, some of which I will try to share with you in a couple posts.
There were several educational tracks offered, encompassing subjects from Enterprise 2.0 to VoIP to Networking to Cloud Computing. I chose to follow two: SaaS, or Software as a Service, and Cloud Computing; most of us are, or are going to be, involved in both.
First: the Cloud.
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