Cloud Watch: Lots of Talk

It's conference season: Interop; the Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) partner conference; the Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) conference; and InfoSecurity Europe. Predictably, there's a lot being said about clouds.

IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) loves the cloud. The company has a CTO for Cloud Computing, Kristof Kloeckner, and his Interop speech this morning included some numbers to back up IBM's cloud worship, Information Week reports. IT labor costs could be cut in half, and capital utilization could be boosted 75 percent, he said.

Microsoft loves the cloud. In a Sunday keynote at the company's Convergence 2010 conference in Atlanta, division head Stephen Elop called it a moneymaking proposition for Microsoft, BusinessWeek reports. He also said 90 percent of Microsoft's engineers could soon be doing cloud-related work, probably under a broad definition of "related."

Guess who doesn't love the cloud...

Remember, back in January, how Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison railed against cloud computing mania? This video comes from four months earlier but got revived this week by news regurgitator Khabar24. Buried in Ellison's schtick is his important point: What matters about "cloud" is the (very old) idea of renting.



(The guy does know how to work a crowd. Admit it, it would be awesome if he bought the Golden State Warriors. He and Mark Cuban could yell at each other as halftime entertainment.)

Security remains a bugaboo for would-be cloud services users. F5 Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: FFIV) enhanced its cloud security as part of the BIG-IP version 10.2 release announced this week.

Cisco, meanwhile, introduced the ScanSafe Web filtering service, which is based on its acquisition of ScanSafe in December. (See Cisco to Acquire ScanSafe.) What's new is that ScanSafe's user-behavior reports can now take a longer-term view, to better track trends, as Network World notes.

A cloud computing analyst saying, "This is not just analysts hyping things up" is probably going to find a tough audience. The quote was given to the BBC yesterday by analyst Philip Carnelley of TechMarketView, defending his company's prediction of cloud-computing spend in the UK doubling by 2012. And it's admittedly hard to take at face value, as blogger Brad Casemore pointed out.

The doubling would come off a small base, as an Ovum Ltd. analyst points out in the article. Carnelley's prediction would put cloud computing at a £1.2 billion (US$1.85 billion) business in 2012.

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading