Business

Thank you for continuing to read the Business & Culture Blog.  The purpose of this blog is to address those areas of innovation, leadership, entrepreneurship, technology and community that lie at the intersection of business and culture.  My law practice focuses on software licensing, entrepreneurship law, SaaS law, legal technology consulting and private equity and funding law.  My goal is for this blog to assist business owners and leaders become more excellent at their craft.  Be sure to subscribe to this blog by clicking the RSS Feed here.

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A group of researchers from UC Berkeley's Schools of Engeneering and Computer Science published a white paper this past week addressing the state of cloud computing, including its opportunities and obstacles. 

There is a lot of confusion on what exactly makes up cloud computing.  Here is an excerpt from the white paper addressing that issue:

Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. The services themselves have long been referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS), so we use that term. The datacenter hardware and software is what we will call a Cloud.

When a Cloud is made available in a pay-as-you-go manner to the public, we call it a Public Cloud; the service being sold is Utility Computing. Current examples of public Utility Computing include AmazonWeb Services, Google AppEngine, and Microsoft Azure. We use the term Private Cloud to refer to internal datacenters of a business or other organization that are not made available to the public. Thus, Cloud Computing is the sum of SaaS and Utility Computing, but does not normally include Private Clouds. We’ll generally use Cloud Computing, replacing it with one of the other terms only when clarity demands it. Figure 1 shows the roles of the people as users or providers of these layers of Cloud Computing, and we’ll use those terms to help make our arguments clear.

The advantages of SaaS to both end users and service providers are well understood. Service providers enjoy greatly simplified software installation and maintenance and centralized control over versioning; end users can access the service “anytime, anywhere”, share data and collaborate more easily, and keep their data stored safely in the infrastructure. Cloud Computing does not change these arguments, but it does give more application providers the choice of deploying their product as SaaS without provisioning a datacenter: just as the emergence of semiconductor foundries gave chip companies the opportunity to design and sell chips without owning a fab, Cloud Computing allows deploying SaaS—and scaling on demand—without building or provisioning a datacenter. Analogously to how SaaS allows the user to offload some problems to the SaaS provider, the SaaS provider can now offload some of his problems to the Cloud Computing provider. From now on, we will focus on issues related to the potential SaaS Provider (Cloud User) and to the Cloud Providers, which have received less attention.

The white paper concludes with addressing the top 10 obstacles and opportunities for cloud computing. 

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See also:

SaaS in 2009 II - High Market Growth
SaaS in 2009 - Positive Outlook
Cloud Computing in 2009 - A Trend in Hosting
Private Equity in 2009 - Don't Give Up