Gartner Defines Cloud Computing

Posted by Margaret Dawson on December 7, 2009

I’m at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit in Las Vegas (where else?), and they just wrapped up the opening comments and keynote. Have to admit the first few minutes of the keynote were a bit dull, but maybe the coffee was not yet kicking in. However, it was also because the speaker was taking us through the last year of our lives in technology – lower budgets, no credit, raised expectations, those darn vendors, etc. How many times have we heard this story?

It did get interesting, however, when the keynote delved into topics folks have come to hear about and figure out for their own companies: SOA, cloud computing, agile development and related areas.

Gartner defines cloud computing as including the following characteristics:

Service based
Scalable and elastic
Shared
Metered by use
Internet technologies

It’s all about moving budget from Capex to Opex, gaining repeatability and achieving agility and scalability. Oh, and it’s based on SOA, and in fact, says Gartner, you can’t do cloud without a SOA foundation (that’s Service Oriented Architecture).

The speaker also said that cloud is “new” and a game changer. Really? I do believe some aspects of cloud computing are new, and it’s true that companies are moving slowly to the cloud, and few have fully adopted SOA frameworks. However, Hubspan has been providing cloud-based integration services that encompass all five of the above criteria with a single-instance, multi-tenant architecture for years. I agree that some enterprises have been slow to adopt, but I think the value of business integration and doing it in the cloud is starting to resonate at a whole new level.

Here’s a related Gartner report - Cloud Computing: Defining and Describing an Emerging Phenomenon: www.gartner.com