Cloud Middleman – “maker of girdles”
February 3rd, 2009 by Julia Lim
If you look up the word “middleman” at dictionary.com, you get the usual definitions of “person who plays an economic role intermediate between producer and retailer or consumer” and the more generic “person who acts as an intermediary”. But clearly better than both of those is the origin of the term in the late middle ages as “maker of girdles“. I swear I did not make this up.
So it is with a big grin on my face that I read the news about Zimory, a Deutsche Telekom spin-off that launched Public Cloud, a marketplace for companies that want to buy and sell hosted server capacity online. As much as I would like to scoff at yet another middleman trying to get their cut of the action, I have to say I like this idea. Services like Public Cloud open up monetary opportunities for a broader range of companies to play in the cloud space; cloud computing is not and shouldn’t be limited to just the big guys, e.g., Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Creating a marketplace that brings together buyers and sellers in this way supports some of the promises of the cloud – driving down price and raising quality of service in a truly competitive arena where end users don’t have to worry about who provides the service, just buy and pay for the service they need (all other things like security, sla’s, etc being equal). In this scenario, there are more choices and customers’ applications (via virtual machines in Zimory’s case) should be easily portable between cloud providers.
I couldn’t find the article, but I remember reading about a university that was offering extra space in its datacenter, for a fee to companies. That’s certainly not the only example of a IT group with computing to spare. Couple that with utilizing the IT management resources – tools and people – that you have already invested in, put yourself out there on a cloud marketplace like Zimory and presto, you just might turn IT from a cost center to a revenue generator.
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1. Cloud Computing - 4 Analy&hellip | June 23rd, 2009 at 4:48 pm
[...] will look very different than it does now – there won’t be just a few mega-providers but thousands, with cloud supply chains and clouds built on [...]
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