February 13, 2009
Cloud computing is for real
I had an interesting talk with Kevin from ReadyTech yesterday. His business of hosting training platforms for EMC, Genesys, Documentum, and many other enterprise software vendors is going extremely well. In general ReadyTech hosts training systems on their own servers in their own data centers. These are complex images, with lots of software components that need to be installed to run a proper training class. So when Readytech prepares an image for a class, it has the full stack of software, and customers can access the training platform from anywhere in the world via Readytech APIs.
The surprise to me was that cloud computing has advanced to the level where Readytech can plug their complex images into the "cloud". Amazon, for example, can provide a full system, OS and everything, and Readytech can use this virtual computer to apply a complex immage and provide access to their enterprise clients. Kevin told me that if they don't have a cloud story, they would be in trouble as a hoster within a few years.
I had been thinking of Cloud computing more on the line of web services, and specific integration areas, such as Databases, SaaS. But it is moving pretty fast.