We hear about the cloud and cloud computing. But did you know?…
“The ‘cloud of clouds’
has three distinct layers. The outer one
called ‘software as a service’ (SaaS), includes web-based applications such as
Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, and Salesforce.com, which helps firms keep
track of their customers….Going one
level deeper, there is ‘platform as a service,’ (PaaS), which means an
operating system living in the cloud.
Such services allow developers to write applications for the web and
mobile devices. Offered by Google,
Salesforce.com and Microsoft, this market is also fairly easy to measure, since
there are only a few providers, and their offerings have not really taken off
yet….The most interesting layer—the
only one that really deserves to be called ‘cloud computing,’ say purists—is
infrastructure as a service (IaaS). IaaS
offers basic computing services from number crunching to data storage, which
customers can combine to build highly adaptable computer systems.”
Market leaders are GoGrid, Rackspace and
Amazon Web Services. Amazon is by far
the largest, owning about 80 to 90% of the current capacity. The cloud is estimated by Forrester Research
to grow to $56 billion in 2020 from about $1 billion in 2010.
From Threes, Chapter 8, “Threes in Business and Technology”
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