I have been reading about the cloud thing and it looked strange that Amazon is among the leaders in cloud with their EC2/S3 and other stuff. The infrastructure biggies or the virtualization king vmware doesn't seem to have anything worth talking about in the clouds except may be IBM ?
But if you think a bit more about it, the existing players don't want to rock their boats(loaded with hardware and software around it) with a new way of selling infrastructure. Though they may be leaders in technology areas in isolation, typically the big corporations are a set of silos with their own agendas who fail to see the end-to-end picture. These corporations with significant investment in hard core research finds it very difficult to productize the innumerable research ideas they patent and write papers on it. It is difficult to find many game changing innovations originating from any of these research labs. Collaboration is a big casualty in these organizations. IMO, these corporations should let go off their labs and instead collaborate with universities and other non-profit research organizations to further their business goals!
Thursday, July 17, 2008
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I think the biggies are aware of the cloud computing potential. One of the reason (and the real reason) for the EDS purchase by HP was touted to be the 100 odd datacenters that EDS had. Also I heard HP was looking at purchasing another 30-40 odd data centers from BT for addition to HP's cloud computing infrastructure. And last week Yahoo! too announced their intention to participate in cloud computing. You are right, it looks like Google,Amazon and IBM seem to be ahead at this point in time.
ReplyDeleteSure, they will talk about it and do something when they see the niche players are making money hitting their revenues. In fact what they will do is acquire one of these niche guys to get into the act. But the point is that reflects very poorly on their research group and engineering - either they don't have worthy research around the area(which isn't true), but a significant collaboration problem in taking the ideas to market. So I am wondering if there is any real need for a hard-core research group at all ?
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