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“Gartner defines cloud computing as a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service” using Internet technologies to multiple external customers (…) users of IT-related services will be able to focus on what the service provides them rather than how the services are implemented or hosted (…) cloud computing is very much an evolving concept that will take many years to fully mature. It also underlined the fact that the cloud-computing model is not simply the next generation of the Internet.”

“Gartner Says Cloud Computing Will Be As Influential As E-business,” June 2008.

I’m blogging while listening to Dr. Vogel, Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com. He is responsible for the company’s technology vision. AWS, Amazon Web Services, adopted SOA, service oriented architecture, to make the company’s e-commerce platform be available as a service to start-ups, so that they could easily set up webstores.

• Today, this service is also leveraged by large retailers such as Target and Amazon’s S3, simple storage service, is currently hosting 50+ billion objects.
• Amazon is investing in scalability of a massive scale, which some speakers refer to as “Internet scale.”
• Dr Vogel talked about IT’s 70/30 rule by which 70% of the time appears to be spent on undifferentiated heavy lifting just to make sure that the enterprise systems keep running. That leaves innovation and the creation of differentiated value with just 30% of the effort.
• In theory, enterprises embracing cloud computing would turn that ratio around, being able to allocate more time, effort and investments to the actual business. Amazon’s engineering teams are in direct contact with customers to get them there.

The following are the cloud computing services covered in Dr Vogel’s talk:

• Compute: EC2, elastic compute cloud
• Messaging: SQS, simple queue service
• Storage: S3, simple storage service and Simple DB & EBS
• Content Delivery Network: Cloudfront, a pay as you go CDN service

Amazon’s “infrastructure services for everyone” is based on the following value proposition:

• scalable: increase or decrease capacity in minutes
• cost-effective: low rate, and pay as you go (utility model)
• reliable: based on Amazon’s own proven infrastructure
• secure: multi-layer facilities by which physical infrastructure access is tightly controlled, as well as access over the network and a variety of additional control mechanisms meeting security certifications
• ecosystem: Stax, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, Sun, Salesforce, Capgemni, etc.

Last night IntelePeer discussed CaaS, communications as a service. While SaaS is mostly about delivering on demand web services, CaaS focuses on enabling people to communicate with other people by means of easily integrating IP telephony, messaging, enterprise collaboration and social networking tools in a multimedia fashion. So, CaaS is also known as cloud telephony, which integrates rich media (voice, data and video.)

• Cloud telephony exposes all kinds of capabilities through web interfaces, making everything be as simple as possible by abstracting complexity away in Charles Studt’s own words.
• Basically, the intent is to get web developers and even end users to plug and play communication features when creating software applications delivered as a service. CEBP, communications enabled business processes take unified communications one step further.

I’m discussing e-commerce and cloud telephony together in this post because most analysts expect them to come together. This means online stores where customers can communicate with retailers and other customers to deliver a better user and brand experience. This also means integrating the I and the C in ICT, information and communication technologies, instead of just talking about traditional IT or telcos.

Having said that, I recall reading articles talking about that back when eBay bought out Skype. Granted that Skype is based on a p2p network (pc to pc, no cloud) but, for all that matters, one cannot help wondering why they did not succeed in that front. In any case, CaaS vendors are making inroads in the CRM market, customer relationship management, and on demand call center solutions. Ribbit and Salesforce being one popular example.

J. de Francisco blogging from Chicago on April 22

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Other posts of interest:

• Cloud Slam 2009 (1); (2); (3)
• eComm 2009 (1); (2); (3)
• 2.0 companies leverage 2.0 technologies
• open cloud manifesto