Desktop As A Service (DAAS) and The IPAD?

Ran across this desktop virtualization service today (www.icloud.com) and realized that market matured considerably since the some of the initial vendors in this launched this space (Gh.o.st).

Running in a WIN7/IE8 (no chrome support), the browser (from which I'm writing within) is responsive, the productivity work stack is sufficient and the multimedia capabilities including youtube HD were as expected you would expect on bare metal.

... Leading to off course to the "ubiqoutus slate" evoloution that the Ipad will create and catapult into the mainstream. After a number of less than successful tablet implementations, the market seems poised to benefit from the marketing/content market that Apple has developed Iphone/Itouch ecosystem.

Applications such as ICloud.com will become the killer application for Tablets which are what Ipads will become. The need for the horsepower (like the telephone system) is in the cloud.

Seismic Shift in compute models?

With Amazon's launch spot pricing/bidding for EC2 the case/drive for an enterprise compute spigot becomes all the more compelling. Today when pricing solutions typically we comparing the an internal TCO against a fix rate of X for compute cycles. With this model... we can and should be building provisioning engines that push/burst computation (HPC requirements/apps) to where it's the cheapest.

With this move by Amazon I would expect to see other players follow suit and quickly and perhaps some of that follow the sun model we strive for in IT can finally be achieved through global cloud mesh with cost based provision layer in between computing needs and computing resources.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/web_services/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222001983

As an investory you have to look upwards

As I have been telling most of my friends for some time - it's really not "if" it's really when.

http://www.fool.com/newsletters/15/sfr/04/02.htm?source=irbsiteml6800014

Online Virtualization panel webcast

click here to view

Good Cloud Mashup Blog

http://www.johnmwillis.com/

Hypervisor Shoot out

it's a little geeky I know if your interested in the big picture but beneath it all sits the enabling technology - the Hypervisor. I found this shoot today comparing XEN, HyperV and VMware for those interested these type of things...

http://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2009/03/02/lab-experiment-hypervisors.aspx

Great article on clouding in information week comparing vendors

This article contrasts some of the main differences between some of the major IaaS vendors. Surprisingly GoGrid fell off the map (not rated) but it does at least provide a landscape view along with contract and cost per hour etc.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/utility_ondemand/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=219501228