The 2012 conference organised by GigaOm Structure drew some big names from the world of IT to discuss the future direction of cloud computing.
Among the 100s of firms attending this year’s meeting that was held about a week ago were American Express, Amazon, Comcast, Credit Suisse, Facebook, General Electric, Google, IBM, eBay, Fidelity Investments, Mediabrands, Microsoft and Rackspace.
This year’s event, which I believe is the fifth in succession, was appropriately entitled “What will happen to cloud in the next 5 years?” It focused on what needs to be done to ensure that individuals, businesses and organisations start to embrace more fully this innovative technology.
Cloud computing tends to revolve around three things – Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Provider as a Service (PaaS). The latter was particularly emphasised with a number of discussions on what this means to cloud’s future and who will offer it, and perhaps more interesting, what will be offered. That is, the types of products being developed.
Google has, for a long time, immersed itself in all three aspects from infrastructure to software, so is now a market leader. Other companies such as Microsoft are trying to compete but are struggling. So, it will be interesting to see what happens to companies such as Microsoft over the next five years. Its own web-based software, Office 365 has not been that warmly received despite the popularity of its traditional Office products.
In contrast Amazon, which is traditionally an online shop, has also embraced this new technology, so it will be interesting to follow what it does with it.
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