Cloud computing: what’s in a name?
It is good to see that ICONZ has called out Orcon over its claim to have “just launched NZ’s first locally developed cloud computing infrastructure service” (made during the NZ Cloud Computing Summit no less). On the other hand, good on Orcon for landing a pre-emptive marketing strike and pushing its superior on-demand features.
Cloud computing easily ranks on par with Web 2.0 as a “term that means whatever we want it to mean” (i.e. meaningless). And try explaining the difference between cloud computing, software-as-a-service, network computing and ASP. So it’s arguably both meaningless and redundant.
Clearly, though, it is beloved by marketing departments. Interestingly, the term “cloud computing”, which only started gaining popularity in late 2007, hasn’t reduced “software as a service” in searches while becoming the dominant buzzword, as illustrated here (Google Trends):
It will be interesting to see how other NZ ISP’s and web hosts respond. Anything that promotes competition between, and awareness of, homegrown providers will be a good thing. It is surprising that most of the Kiwi companies I have talked to about cloud computing (well, it is catchy) have only ever mentioned EC2 or Azure, even though their main customer bases are in New Zealand.
