Will cloud services be traded just like stocks and bonds one day?
October 9, 2013
Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.
Today, cloud computing resources are bought and sold in a fairly straightforward process: A company needs extra compute capacity, for example, so they contract with a provider who spins up virtual machines for a certain amount of time.
But what will that process look like in, say, 2020? If efforts by a handful of companies come to fruition, there could be a lot more wheeling and dealing that goes on behind the scenes. An idea is being floated by several companies to package cloud computing resources into blocks that can be bought and sold on a commodity futures trading market. It would be similar to how financial instruments like stocks, bonds and agricultural products like corn and wheat are traded on exchanges by investors…
Could this actually happen? “It’s got some challenges,” says Jeffery Harris, the former chief economist at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees futures trading. Regulators would have to go through a long-check list to ensure there is no room for manipulation in such a market before allowing it, predicts Harris, who now is a professor of finance at Syracuse University’s School of Management. There could be technical challenges too, both in terms of how such an exchange would be operated and how the resources sold on the exchange would actually be consumed by end users. Overall though, Harris says the idea is viable, yet still in the early days…
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