Most of the experts agree: cloud computing will, in fact, transform the way appliances are developed, deployed and maintained.

While the hype rages around cloud computing, most cloud implementations go the way of the private cloud and avoid the public clouds for now.  Private clouds are exactly what they sound like.  Your own instance of SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS that exists in your own data center, all tucked away, protected and cozy.  You own the hardware, you can hug your server…

Having open-sourced Node.js and seen the positive reception to Facebook’s Open Compute platform, Joyent is continuing in the open source tradition and releasing the source code of SmartOS, the operating system behind its cloud computing offerings.

Joyent developed SmartOS as a new complete cloud software stack. Today, it has ported KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) to its SmartOS operating system and open sourced the code, making it freely available via download and launching a community that will continue the collaboration on the project…

The Internet has removed the middleman in many ways. It’s a natural tool for disintermediation, allowing passengers to book their own plane tickets, readers to create their own clipping services or candidates to find their own job openings. But just as public cloud computing has brought the power of the Internet to large businesses, it has also created the need for a new type of middleman – what Gartner has called a cloud services brokerage…

The democratisation or consumerisation of IT

Some IT industry commentators and analysts have been drawing analogies between cloud computing and technologies such as electric power for a number of years.

Nicholas Carr predicted the consumerisation of IT and the emergence of utility style computing services as early as 2004…

MWEB’s introduction of truly uncapped ADSL has led to tumbling connectivity costs and bandwidth constraints rapidly becoming a distant memory. The playing field has been levelled and South African businesses of all sizes are now free to explore the many benefits cloud computing has to offer.

So says Andre Joubert, GM of MWEB Business, who points out that in regions like North American and Europe, where abundant bandwidth has been a way of life for many years, cloud computing is rapidly becoming mainstream…

Last week, InfoWorld’s David Linthicum made what I think is a very astute and long overdue observation: The term "cloud computing" has approached the point of being meaningless. As he points out, that’s not because nobody can agree on what the cloud is or has been created to do, but because every vendor in the IT space is falling over themselves to tell you just how "cloudy" they are — and spending a mint in marketing dollars to do it. Along the way, they’ve diluted the term to the point where it’s hard to tell what anyone’s really talking about anymore.

A particularly powerful area to apply Cloud computing is the automation of “unstructured content workflows” – Those business processes conducted manually via Word documents sent via email, conference calls and other multimedia that sits outside of enterprise applications.

Applications like CRM tackle a particular sub-set of processes relevant to customer information, and can often implement workflows like ‘Sales Quote’ for example. However this is just a record for reporting purposes, the actual work itself is achieved through writing it in Word and using email to share it with management for approvals etc…

"Cloud Expo was announced on February 24, 2007, the day the term ‘cloud computing’ was coined," said Fuat Kircaali, founder and chairman of SYS-CON Events, Inc. "Cloud has become synonymous with ‘computing’ and ‘software’ in two short years, and this event has become the new PC Expo, Comdex, and InternetWorld of our decade. By 2012, more than 50,000 delegates per year will be attending Cloud Expo."