An Application War is Brewing in the Cloud!

       by Matt Asay  -  12/30/09

Today's cloud-computing vendors focus on infrastructure, but that won't be the case for long. It can't be. As competing vendors seek to differentiate themselves, they're going to move "up the stack" into applications.

It's like the history of enterprise computing, played out in months and years instead of decades.

Just give me my !%!%! apps, already!

Oracle arguably set this strategy in motion when it acquired its way to a complete infrastructure-plus-applications portfolio to lower customer acquisition costs and improve its competitive differentiation for CIOs. IBM and Microsoft also went that route, though to differing degrees and in different ways.

Cloud-computing platform vendors are going to have to do the same thing, except they don't have the luxury of waiting.

It's not enough for cloud vendors to build the infrastructure and pray, "Field of Dreams" style, that customers will come. They won't. Not without applications and a host of other issues worked out for them, not by them.

Even Google, born in the cloud, recognizes this. Instead of forcing government customers into its public cloud, the company is building a dedicated cloud for government organizations in the U.S. Google's reasoning?

We also want to do our part to make it easier for government to transition to cloud computing. We recognize that government agencies have unique regulatory and compliance requirements for IT systems, and cloud computing is no exception. So we've invested a lot of time in understanding government's needs and how they relate to cloud computing. To help meet those requirements we're taking two important steps....

One step is certification, and the other is dedicated hosting. As much as Google may hope that its other prospective Google Apps customers won't have "unique...requirements," they do (or think they do). it's a losing battle to tell them otherwise, at least in the short term. If an enterprise giant like GE demands a private cloud, GE is going to get it.

READ MORE:    Cnet.com