Is the Horizon Lined With Specialty Clouds?
June 25th, 2009 : Rich Miller Will specialized cloud platforms emerge to offer services customized around the needs of a particular industry vertical? Or does too much specialization de-cloudify the whole endeavor? That was the focus of a session at GigaOm’s Structure 09 conference in San Francisco, where panelists agreed that specialization will become more prominent as the cloud matures. Up to a point. “There will be different kinds of clouds, for sure,” said Yousef Khalidi, a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft working on the Windows Azure cloud platform. “At the same time, if you want a cloud, you want some scale and uniformity. Those are the value propositions of clouds. There’s a slippery slope beyond which we’re just providing custom networks.” So what types of specialized clouds make sense? Here are some of the areas identified by the panel: Specialization by Industry Verticals: Savvis Chief Technical officer Bryan Doerr says there are a number of vertical ripe for customized c
