This post was written by Mulah Johnson
Hewlett-Packard (HP), Intel Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have announced an ambitious research initiative focused on studying the software, hardware and datacenter management issues surrounding cloud computing. The group’s new Cloud Computing Test Bed is aimed at creating a large, globally distributed testing environment that they hope will encourage unprecedented levels of research. Although several companies are already offering some cloud computing services, Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs, believes that substantial effort is needed.
Read the full article here
On Slashdot, Ian Lamont says that Dell Inc. is trying to trademark the cloud computing term. The phrase entered the tech lexicon years ago, but Dell’s application with serial number 77139082 was made in early 2007 to the US Patent and Trademark Office, apparently in connection with data center products and services that it was promoting around that time. However, a quick search of Google News has indicated that Dell itself did not use the term in press releases or discussions with indexed English-language media sources from 1996 to 2006, Lamont revealed.
In the “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2008″ report, Gartner has cited cloud computing, green IT and social-computing platforms as the technologies that are set to be widely accepted by enterprise over the next two to five years. All of these technologies are at the peak of what the report calls their “hype cycle”, a term Gartner began using in 1995 to describe the human response to technology, from over-enthusiasm at the beginning, through a period of disillusionment with the technology, to an eventual understanding of the technology’s relevance and role in a market or domain.
On BusinessWeek, Rachael King says that with more and more companies tapping into Web-based applications, there is a major shift in the way companies obtain software and computing capacity. Rachael said that Corporate America is catching up on cloud computing, which is the use of remote location, rather than a desktop computer, handheld machine, or a company’s own servers, to perform computing tasks.
AT&T announced its new cloud computing service on August 12, dubbed “AT&T Synaptic Hosting.” With the new offering, the telecommunications company joins Amazon, Google and IBM as a service provider in the nascent application hosting market.