I was perusing John Willis’ list of links yesterday and I came across a cool piece done by Datamation.com entitled, 85 Cloud Computing Vendors Shaping the Emerging Cloud.
No turning back
The article which supplies short profiles of 85 cloud players, isn’t wishy-washy about what it believes is the inevitability of the cloud model. While it feels there will both a backlash against cloud-mania as well as a well publicized disaster the article states:
Still, the bad news won’t kill the cloud. We can’t ever go back to enclosed datacenters. The cloud is simply easier, faster and more flexible.
“Who says Dell is just a hardware firm?”
Dell comes in at number 10 on the list of the fab 85. One of the big focuses of the Dell section is Dell’s Datacenter Solutions Group (which I am a part of):
…the company launched DCS – Data Center Solutions – to target an audience of businesses that need help configuring a cloud-based datacenter. DCS handles everything from optimization to project management to global consulting. Who says Dell is just a hardware firm? Referring to DCS, Dell CEO Michael Dell told Businessweek in 2008 that, “We created a whole new business just to build custom products for those customers. Now it’s a several-hundred-million-dollar business, and it will be a billion-dollar business in a couple of years—it’s on a tear.”
It also keys in on some of Dell’s recent acquisitions in this space:
Dell has made a number of acquisitions to build out the software side of its cloud offering, including Everdream (desktop management software), Silverback Technologies (remote monitoring) and Message One (email management). The goal, it appears: provide one-stop shopping for businesses that want to build an automated datacenter running commodity boxes, all optimized for the cloud. That is likely a lucrative strategy.
If they think this is cool stuff, wait until they see what we have planned 
Pau for now…