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Cloud Computing Success Stories Continue to Attract Newcomers

3cld — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:12:07 +0000

While most of the cloud computing chatter has been about what it is and how it works I believe what matters most is how it is being used to make a meaningful difference for businesses. So I’m going to be writing about success stories that a typical business person will understand. If you’re aware of a success story that is worthy of mention please contact me via the contact form available from the NAVBAR on the site.

Committed from the outset to leveraging the power of the Internet and cloud computing Zuora offers billing and payment solutions for small businesses on a subscription basis. This makes it easy for any size company to build, manage, and grow a subscription business. The ability to integrate Zuora’s Z-Billing service into PayPal and/or SalesForce.com makes it an attractive solution for small businesses. Already over 100 companies are using Zuora’s service and paying on a monthly basis.

SmugMug, an online photo storage application that stores more than half a petabyte of data on S3, estimates cost savings on service and storage to be close to $1 million. It is a heavy user of the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing resources to meet surges in demand.
The New York Times Archives + Amazon Web Services = TimesMachine – The Times harnessed the power of EC2 to process terabytes of archival data using hundreds of EC2 instances within 36 hours.

Animoto, an online presentation video generator that needs gobs of computing power for video processing, recently successfully withstood a surge in Web traffic that would kill most companies’ systems by scaling up their processing power quickly using EC2. At one point, they were using as many as 3,500 virtual instances running at the same time.

Here’s a video of Barton George interviewing Animoto co-founder and President Jason Hsiao.

Click here to view the embedded video.

White House Appointee Vivek Kundra is a Cloud Computing Fan

3cld — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 00:33:35 +0000

The tech industry is abuzz about the nation’s new CIO, Vivek Kundra, wanting to move the feds towards cloud computing. Imagine the discussions taking place within the brain trusts in government IT contractor’s conference rooms.

We’re thrilled with the news! Software companies that have made sure the feds are addicted to their wares are not.

Check out this site Kundra was involved in promoting: Apps for Democracy to better understand why there is so much buzz and perhaps some panic in some quarters of the software industry.

For more information and viewpoints:

WJS – Digits Blog: Inside the Head of Obama’s CIO
OSTATIC: Bodes Well for Open Source

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Microsoft Says to Google: Get Off of My Cloud

3cld — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 20:57:57 +0000

Last Friday Business Week reported about Microsoft plans to build up to 20 state-of-the-art data centers as it tries to keep pace with one of it’s chief cloud computing rivals Google. These super data centers are no small deal with an average cost per center running an estimated $1 billion.

This major move to build super data centers by Microsoft are part of what they describe as the biggest strategic shift since the mid-1990s. They have also unveiled a slew of offerings in recent weeks that embrace cloud computing. There’s Azure, a new operating system that lets companies run software either on their own computers or as a service delivered via the Internet by Microsoft. There’s a new Windows Live offering that lets consumers store, retrieve, and share photos, blogs, and other Web content with friends. And Microsoft has announced an Internet version of its Exchange corporate e-mail, and plans to do the same with its Office software.