10 Cloud Computing Predictions For 2009
In some respects, the cloud computing market arrived in a big way in 2008. Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), EMC (NYSE: EMC)/VMware, IBM (NYSE: IBM), Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), and a dozen other vendors introduced products and services for on-demand, pay-as-you-go computing.
In other ways, however, cloud computing is still nascent. Google's "platform as a service" App Engine is only in preview mode, Microsoft's Azure Platform Services have yet to be delivered, and Oracle and SAP are watching and waiting from the sidelines. In addition, businesses adopting cloud services are still in the minority, as IT pros mull the security risks, governance implications, and data-integration challenges of this new IT delivery model.
