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The term cloud computing was publicly uttered for the first time by the CEO of Google Inc. Eric Schmidt in 2006. Ever since all the companies of technology industry are jockeying to associate themselves with the ‘CLOUDS’.

In 2006 Amazon.com Inc., began selling an elastic compute cloud service for programmers to rent Amazon’s giant computers. Juniper Networks Inc., which makes gear for data transmission, dubbed its latest project Stratus. A research program called OpenCirrus was recently launched by Yahoo Inc., Intel Corp. & handful of other companies.


What is Cloud computing?
Cloud computing in a broad sense describes something apparent to anybody who is using internet, where the information is stored & processed on computers somewhere else ‘in the clouds’ & brought back to your screen when required. Apparently no two clouds are identical. Backroom mass of servers & switches of a company are cloudlike. Research firm IDC defines the segment as "an emerging IT development, deployment and delivery model, enabling real-time delivery of products, services and solutions over the Internet. Gartner Inc. calls it "a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are provided 'as a service' to external customers using Internet technologies"; its forecast includes online advertising.

Social networking sites like Facebook Inc., Google’s email service, Gmail etc are public. While other like corporate networks, are closed to outsiders & can only be accessed by administrators. The liking for “network-distributed parallel processing”, “often packed as solutions” that are “end to end & scalable” was pushed by companies long ago. Cloud is a single term serving as all of the above. Cloud based services are accessible & much easier to grasp than ASP (Application Service Provision).�

Clouds had been able to come a long way. By the late 1990s, they had become the go-to metaphor for all things Internet. The PowerPoint set used cloud icons in their presentations, at times referring to the Internet simply as "the cloud." New shades of meaning emerged over the past decade as Google and other Internet companies created software that could run simultaneously on multiple servers - hence, operate in a "cloud."

Despite its recent gush in popularity, the cloud is among the oldest pieces of computer jargon, says Alex Bochannek, a curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. For decades, engineers drew them in schematic diagrams to show where their own network joins another whose inner workings are unknown or irrelevant. "You symbolize that with a cloud, or some amorphous shape," says Mr. Bochannek.

Research firm IDC predicts cloud computing will reach $42 billion in 2012. Gartner Inc. projects world-wide cloud-services revenue will rise 21.3% in 2009 to $56.3 billion. Merrill Lynch last year estimated cloud-computing revenues would reach $160 billion in 2011. In the full fiscal year since Sales force started using the term cloud computing, its revenue grew 44%.

Cloud-themed puns have since multiplied, generating even a few seemingly contradictory uses. Sun Microsystems Inc. recently unveiled a product called the "Sun Cloud." Microsoft Corp. sells a cloud service called "Azure," which the dictionary defines as a cloudless sky. Apple Inc.’s new Mobile Me product is branded not with the word cloud, but with an image. Dell Inc. applied to trademark the term cloud computing last year.

Oracle, too, would probably start using the label. Oracle's upcoming software as "cloud-computing ready”, is ready to be launched in the field.


Colliding Clouds
Cloud computing may be the next big thing to emerge, but its politics is as old as the mainframe. On the issue of ‘Open Cloud Manifesto’ the majors IT giants are into combat with each other. Remarkably, the leaders of cloud computing like Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com & Microsoft are not in this game.

Many technical problems have yet to be solved, and the industry has still not even settled on a definition of cloud computing. Agreeing on principles for openness and perhaps even standards at this stage would benefit some firms and hurt others.

The issue essentially calls for computing firms not to fall back on bad old habits by trying to lock in customers as computing becomes a utility, generated somewhere on the network (‘in the cloud’) and supplied as a service. Since there will be many different computing clouds, the manifesto points out, customers should be able to move their data and applications easily from one to another, and ‘open’ standards, not controlled by one company, should be used whenever possible.

It would create opportunities for latecomers and for new start-ups, and make life easier for firms who help companies stitch together their IT systems. But it would also rein in those firms that have already built cloud-computing businesses, often using proprietary technologies developed to solve particular problems. Although most companies would agree on the need for openness in theory, there is room for disagreement in practice about the timing.

The supporters & opponents have calmed down a bit but when the cloud computing flares up, the controversies may flare up again.