Virtual service

Cloud computing, the notion of outsourcing hardware and software to Internet service providers, is showing the classic signs of disruptive technology--it's not good enough for the masses yet, but it has clear potential to shake things up. Forrester Research on Monday released a report written by James Staten, an IT operations and infrastructure analyst, saying that cloud computing does not meet the needs of large businesses. But that could be only temporary. The services offered by a new crop of hosting providers, such asAmazon Web Services, are where the overall hosting market is going, according to Staten. "Cloud computing looks very much like the instantiation of many vendors' visions of the data center of the future; it's an abstracted, fabric-based infrastructure that enables dynamic movement, growth, and protection of services that is billed like a utility. ***

SAP has finally launched its software-as-a-service offering, dubbed "ByDesign". I'm not sure if this is intended to imply "intelligent design" and the idea that divinity is somehow behind SAP's Big New (old) Idea, but as some point out, the big loser in ByDesign may be SAP itself. Time will tell if SAP can have it both ways: traditional, complex and mightily expensive ERP versus its new SaaS, easier to use and moderately expensive (but comparatively cheap) ERP. I think this is the right thing for SAP to do as far as its customers are concerned. But it may not bode well for SAP, ***

I will predict that virtually every open-source company (including Red Hat) will eventually be acquired by a big proprietary software company. Thus spake Tim O'Reilly in the comments to one of his other posts. Tim believes that open source, at least as defined by open-source licensing, has a short shelf life that will be consumed by Web 2.0 (i.e., Web companies hijacking open-source software to deliver proprietary Web services) or by traditional proprietary software vendors. In other words, why don't I just give up, sell out, and go home? I guess I would if I thought that Tim were right. He's not, not in this instance. There's something more fundamental going on here than "Proprietary software meets open source. Proprietary software decides to commandeer open source. Open source proves to be a nice lapdog to proprietary software. ***