Everything as a Service: The Growth of Cloud Computing

Everything is moving into the cloud. Well not exactly everything, but you kinda know what I mean. Very many IT products are morphing into services and vanishing into an amorphous existence on the Internet, known as “The Cloud.” Let’s take stock. First of all, for the sake of perspective, I’ll list some well known capabilities that either were born in the cloud or quickly headed into the cloud as part of the early web. We might not think of these things as being “as a service” (aaS), but there’s no reason not to think of them that way:

• Search/Navigation (aaS): The search capabilities of Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ask, etc. provide the directories of the web as a service, either as a search capability or as structured navigation. the business model is advertising-led.
• Information (aaS): The web embodies a vast information pool that opens up to some degree with the use of any search engine. However, there are also sites that specialize in providing pools of organized information (Wikipedia, Wikileaks, etc.) or organized links (Netvibes, Google News, etc.) and particularly socially-networked links (Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, etc.). The revenue streams are primarily through advertising.
• Market Making (aaS): These are sites that enable the sale of goods by the owner of the goods. They make the market. It includes auction sites like eBay and Taobao, which take a percentage of every sale. It also includes sites like Craig’s list and Freecycle, neither of which involve a fee of any kind.
• Payment (aaS): Paypal pretty much took the air out of this market with its brilliantly viral service – although Google is rumored to have a competitive capability in gestation. The banks missed this opportunity entirely. Which is bizarre because the “payment transaction” is their business.
• etail i.e. Retail (aaS): eTail, particularly the success of Amazon, is what launched the web as a business “el dorado” and the amount of retail on the web continues to grow year-on-year. This could be viewed as a beyond-your-imagination extension of what was previously the consumer catalog business.

Let’s now consider more recent developments in the cloud, starting in the obvious place: running hosted applications:

• Application Software (aaS): This is what most people would classify as SaaS, a trend that has been lead by Salesforce.com, which includes Oracle online (in terms of business apps) and both Zoho and Google Apps in terms of office productivity apps. Salesforce.com now has a whole software ecosystem of other related apps. Ultimately most business apps will be available in this way.
• Security (aaS): Sophos, Kaspersky, and others offer Security as a service. The actual mix of what you get varies. Spam filtering as a service was where it all began and it has been growing from there.
• Backup and Storage (aaS): On-line back-up and storage as a service has been available for quite a while. I remember meeting with LiveVault (whom I believe had the first service) about three or four years ago. More recently Mozy has been attracting attention as a from-home back-up service. Indeed, it attracted a great deal of attention, when EMC acquired it.
• Communications (aaS): You could argue that communications has always been sold as a service, with the telephone being the access device. In any event, there are now a number of web-hosted communications services. Aside from Skype, there’s Grand Central (owned by Google), Ribbit and Jajah, and probably a few others that haven’t made it onto my radar.
• Collaboration (aaS): Webex was the first collaboration as a service web site, unless you include instant messaging capability, in which case it may have been ICQ (but you could classify that under communications as a service). More relevant are Dim Dim (a free Webex service) and Second Life, the virtual world which some companies have used as a venue for virtual meetings.
• Software Lifecycle (aaS): Bungee, a company I wrote about recently, provides a software development environment and set of life-cycle tools as a hosted service. They also host the applications you create, which you pay for on a usage basis.
• Mashups (aaS): StrikeIron, another company I have written about, provides mashups as a service – normally on a paid basis. There is a variety of functionality that is offered. The Programmable Web also provides links to mashups, but most of these are free to connected to.
• Virtual Infrastructure (aaS): Finally, Desktone has a virtual PC business model that involves providing virtual PC infrastructure as a service. It involves thin clients on the desktop with cloud-hosted servers running the PCs.
  
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