After a breakthrough 2008, will cloud computing go mainstream this year?

Unlike netbooks and touch-screen phones that captured the imagination of consumers in 2008, a quiet —" almost invisible"— technology trend called cloud computing also made its mark in the IT world last year.

Cloud computing, defined as something that is delivered over the Internet (in network diagrams, the Internet is represented by a cloud), was finally adopted on a massive scale, at least among enterprises, with the likes of Salesforce.com setting the agenda.
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The cloud computing model, wherein services or applications are offered online instead of the traditional software setup in which software is installed in a computer, has been floated or tried before in numerous forms and names, though they may had differed in some respects.

During the IT boom in the early 2000s, cloud computing was known as ASP or application service provider. Although most of the IT vendors vigorously pushed the model, it somehow didn’t flourish perhaps because it was ahead of its time.

Later on, with companies such as Google posting some success in providing over-the-Internet software like Google Docs, terms like "on-demand" and "software-as-a-service" or (SaaS) came up in the technology vocabulary.

In its current form, cloud computing is gaining some headway in the US, but is surprisingly less popular in developing countries like the Philippines.

But with the financial crisis threatening to shrink the IT spending of companies, cloud computing might just get the break it badly needs, particularly to price-conscious enterprises which can no longer afford the expensive cost of acquiring a conventional CRM (customer relationship management) or even an ERP (enterprise resource planning) solution.

In fact, research firm IDC has forecast cloud computing as one of the few bright spots expected to shine in 2009 amidst the specter of global economic slowdown.

This could also be a reason why Salesforce.com, the most prominent bearer of cloud computing model, is entering its growth phase while the rest of the industry is feeling fidgety on the gloomy economy.

At its annual Dreamforce convention held last November in San Francisco, the "enterprise cloud computing company" proclaimed that its flagship CRM offering is now serving 47,700 companies and about 1.1 million subscribers. Among these customers are blue chip firms Dell Computers and Amazon.com.

It also audaciously unveiled during the same event its mobile strategy which it said it would push to executives to allow them to access their applications on their mobile devices. Already, there had been about 50,000 downloads made from the Application Exchange, Salesforce.com’s apps platform, on the iPhone alone.

With the US now leading the pack, it’s perfectly possible that the rest of the world would catch up. In the Philippines, the obligation of realizing that task seems to fall on the shoulders of technology conglomerate IPVG, the local partner of Salesforce.com. The reality, however, is that anyone, including home-bred tech firms, has the equal chance to cash in on this opportunity.

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BY MELVIN G. CALIMAG
Source：Manila Bulletin online