Cloud as a Business™: A Context for Cloud Computing

While change is a constant in any industry, the emergence of cloud computing transcends technology innovation and accelerates service transformation. This new paradigm requires new thinking and leads to new opportunities. Service providers that embrace Cloud as a Business will be well positioned to realize new revenue streams from the delivery of information technology (IT) services – through the cloud – to enterprises.

Since the 1990s, enterprises have been gradually moving from in-house to off-shore to out-sourced development of IT services. IT services have been evolving from thick client/server enterprise systems with rigid, synchronous processes to thin client web applications with fluid, asynchronous communications. As these trends continue, dedicated hardware with a Linux or Microsoft Windows operating system will increasingly fall out of favor. What will rise to the occasion and fill this void? A next generation operating system that pools resources across out-sourced data centers to deliver the economics and scale required by enterprises. That is the case for cloud computing.

What is cloud computing? The National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the US Department of Commerce, offers the following definition:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

What is the role of service providers in cloud computing? With out-sourcing of IT services and pooling of resources, it is clear that the data center is the new computer. Service providers own, lease, and/or peer distributed networks with large data centers – new computers – located at each point in the network. The compute resources, like natural resources, of each new computer are precious commodities. Service providers manage the supply and distribution of these new economic goods that enterprises increasingly demand.

In partnership with KDDI, Joyent is poised to assist all service providers match supply with demand. How? Joyent developed the new operating system for the new computer. Joyent enables service providers to maintain quality of service and honor service level agreements while delivering real-time business services across a variety of devices.

Service providers collaborating with KDDI and Joyent – that’s Cloud as a Business.

To learn more, please join KDDI and Joyent for an in-depth webinar. Register at joyent.com/kddi/cloudcontext/.

This article and the follow-on webinar are based on The Important Bits: A Context for ‘Cloud Computing’ presented by Jason A. Hoffman, PhD on April 13, 2011 at the Cloud as a Business Executive Forum in San Francisco, CA USA. Hoffman is the co-founder and Chief Scientist at Joyent.

by Geoffrey R. Morrissett
Senior Director, Product Marketing, Joyent, Inc.