To "cloud" services – 5 years. What's next?

On August 24, 2006, five years ago, start of the first "cloud" service Amazon EC2 was announced. But for last years the enterprises could not get rid of all doubts concerning efficiency and safety of use of this model.

The term cloud computing is so widely known, and so abuse it that today it seems - it exists eternally. However till 2006 it is hard to detect any links to cloud computing. When it was told about the idea of creation of pools of resources on demand, regulated and scalable, it occurred in the context of distributed computing.

In fact, when Sun Microsystems whose old Logo "The Network Is a Computer" ("The Network is the Computer") is the embodiment of cloud thinking, opened the public computing resource in March, 2006, it was called Sun Grid. This service allowed users to order computing powers via the Internet and to pay its use through PayPal.

On August 9, 2006 the CEO of Google Eric Schmidt discussed "development of new model" on Search Engine Strategies. Then he also spoke about model within which information services and architecture should be placed on remote servers. "We call it cloud computing - they should be somewhere in "cloud"", - he emphasized. (The link to Schmidt note is taken from the blog posting of John Willis for 2008.)

The question of the future of the industry of cloud computing became key at a conference the VMworld conference which went week in Las Vegas in an interval between arrival of the hurricane Irène and the celebration of the Labor Day. VMworld became the center of gravity of large and small vendors which offered the last developments in the field of virtualization and cloud services.

On Monday Dell made one of the most loud statements of a conference, having submitted the plan of start of service of cloud infrastructure on the basis of technologies of VMware. The statement of Dell took place after five years without month after Amazon announced the Elastic Compute Cloud beta service, or EC2 which probably and was the first service which is called "cloud".

The fact that the distance between new service Dell and start of Amazon EC2 is quite considerable, does not mean that Dell lags behind in cloud business. It is worth reminding that only this year Hewlett-Packard left with the ambitious cloud offer for corporate users. Declarations of Dell and HP show that at the general agiotage in recent years around cloud computing, the way of the most significant part of business to implementation of "clouds" will be long.

Charles King, the analyst of Pund-IT company, considers that many companies doubt need of placement of corporate data and applications for a public cloud environment so far. "All of us still are at early stages of consideration of a possibility of an output of these services in "cloud"", - he noted.

In April, 2011 noted Forrester Research in the forecast that the SaaS segment will experience steady growth and if in 2011 market size is $21.2 billion, then in 2016 it will reach a point of $93 billion. PaaS is relative, volumes of this market will remain are rather small in comparison with SaaS, nevertheless in 2014 the PaaS segment will exceed IaaS volume. In addition, analysts of the company consider that the market of virtualization will be gradually reduced, substituted by newer products.