Clouds enable some of the hottest startups on the planet
http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
[As I discussed in my paper Personal perspectives on the future of R&E networks clouds lower the barriers of entry for small startups to grow and scale. Many R&E networks are now peering with major cloud providers not only to support university researcher, but to also expose young budding entrepreneurs to the benefits of using clouds.
Outside of the US many governments are concerned about the dominance of US cloud infrastructure. But I have to agree with the Economist magazine ownership and location of the cloud infrastructure is not the major economic opportunity. The bigger economic opportunity is with all these innovative startups. And needless to say cloud infrastructure can be zero carbon as demonstrated by the Greenstar project and GreenQloud in Iceland. Some excerpts BSA]
Will Amazon Become The King of Web Hosting Too?
http://gigaom.com/2010/08/06/amazon-web-host/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+OmMalik+(GigaOM)&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
Amazons web services are on track to being a half-a-billion dollar business. They are home to some of the hottest startups on the planet.
Even older startups use their infrastructure. And despite all the false rumors, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly is a customer.
Ironically, the company which put the Cloud in computing has found a fast growth opportunity in a decidedly old fashioned business web hosting.
Newsweek and PBSs network are using Amazon Web Services for hosting their web sites. In addition, large e-consulting firms such as Digitaria and Razorfish are adding a few thousand sites a year to Amazon, Selipsky said. From movie sites to hosting apps for large brands, Amazon suddenly (and perhaps unintentionally) finds itself competing with thousands of web hosts. As more and more media companies integrate Internet and mobile applications into their overall product mix, they are likely to spend more dollars on their infrastructure needs.
Just as Dell and their ilk benefitted from close ties with old fashioned consultancies and sold a lot of hardware to their clients, Amazon can now find itself benefiting from the growth in demand for the services of these new e-consultants. These e-consulting firms are pretty influential, especially when it comes to attracting corporate clients. For instance, Digitaria client Hasbro is hosting the website of its Monopoly game on AWS. It cost the company nearly half of what it would have cost on a traditional hosting set-up.
Personal Perspectives on the Future of R&E networks
http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2010/02/personal-perspective-on-evolving.html
The changing nature of traffic on R&E networks
http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2010/05/changing-traffic-of-r-networks-and.html
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