InformationWeek's Cloud Computing Destination

Shortly before Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference started last Wednesday, the San Francisco Fire Department had locked the doors to Moscone Center to let the crush of bodies entering it disperse before letting in more attendees. I thought, are you kidding me? All this for a mid-size software company? But as I talked to attendees over the next few days, I began to understand what was stoking such enthusiasm I haven't seen in years in the enterprise software industry.

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The U.S. government's Apps.gov Web site provides new visibility into what federal agencies pay for cloud-based applications and commercial software, with offerings from vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, Jive, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com. One of the priciest products on the site: Google's Maps API, which lists for nearly a million dollars.

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There were a couple "aha" moments for me at Interop's Enterprise Cloud Summit. The first was that some companies are already storing hundreds of terabytes of data in the cloud. The second was that it can be a slow and expensive process to move that data from one service provider to another.

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Look up in the sky and you might see cirrus, stratus, or cumulus clouds. Similarly, cloud computing comes in multiple flavors. The one you should choose depends on, among other things, how much vendor lock-in you’re prepared to accept in exchange for banishing complexity from your IT organization.

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"Who would have imagined the explosion of interest in the cloud?" asked Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect, at the opening of Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference this week in Los Angeles. Well, Ozzie foresaw it and he listened to developers on how to best position his company.

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More than 15,000 people are attending the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco starting Tuesday night—good proof that Salesforce.com is fulfilling its destiny as a cloud computing platform provider. (This many people wouldn't show up for a CRM conference.) Meanwhile, down in L.A., Microsoft execs are talking to developers about building apps to run on Windows Azure. Is that the crash-boom-bang of competitive thunderclouds I hear on the horizon?

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The U.S. government's cloud computing portal, Apps.gov, may be a breakthrough in fast, efficient, and transparent IT acquisition, but that doesn't mean it's cheap. Witness the multimillion-dollar software modules available to government agencies on the site.

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I'm beginning to think that fears about cloud security are overblown. The reason: an intellectual framework is already in place for protecting data, applications, and connections. It's called encryption. What's evolving now, and isn't anywhere near fully baked, is a set of agreed-upon implementations and best practices. Today's post talks about some relevant and interesting work from Trend Micro and from IBM.

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Construction on Amazon.com's boarded up data center in Boardman, Ore., will restart in the "not too distant future," according to a report from KEPR, a local TV station. If all goes as planned, the project will be completed in the third quarter of 2010, say local authorities.

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Four days before Microsoft launches its Azure cloud platform to developers at a conference in L.A., Amazon has come up with a .Net software development kit to help Windows developers produce code that runs in Amazon's EC2. It's probably just coincidence. But let's see what they're getting with AWS SDK for .Net.

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