SynApps The Open Source and Gadget blog

Cloud computing will be hard without open source. And distributed systems like the Googleplex or Yahoo's servers that run in house are all the more reason for that. And only an open cloud environment can counter the likes.

Let's take one step after the other:

The industry and press are talking about it. And they will continue heating up to talk about it until it is about as well defined as AJAX (...). But then, what is Cloud Computing and the Cloud in the first place?

Here's an opinion.

Cloud computing is when you distribute your workload so that only a computer can find it again. And distribute your data so that the same applies. And then you call it Google (or Yahoo) and keep all your customers data on your servers. Right? Well, most people seem to like the approach without even thinking twice.

I think it is dangerous.

And the pickup cloud computing companies currently experience seems to support this opinion. With companies like Nirvanix or cohesiveFT or Amazon or ... it becomes a breeze to put your workload onto the net and keep control of your most precious good in an online society: your data. And cloud computing offerings give you the building blocks to do just that.

It takes no wonder Microsoft(tm) is all excited about Yahoo. How come everybody is bashing them over their ISO stunt around document formats (hey, wouldn't it be ISO to blame here? And governments like the German one, allowing the teaching of Microsoft Apps on public television, without offering any such support to open source alternatives? ...)? True, it is bad. Bad for the industry, bad for consumers, bad for business, to have one company set the standards. But then there is another kind of beast loose on the internet, and people seem to like it: with Google and Yahoo, and now Apple joining and Microsoft trying to sort out their positioning vs. their in-house business, customers data just sits on servers owned by companies. Think about it. We are all wound up about a data format being proprietary, what about the whole service - including data, data format, application - EVERYTHING being proprietary? As with Google.

Sure, there is plenty of figg leaves. All the relevant players pay big dollars for being the good guys in the public. And they release plenty of commodity code for getting the open source community to even help them. What marvelous strategy!

Now, Open-Xchange goes to market with hosters, right? The data resides on hosters' servers, is maintained and backed up by the hoster and it takes some cunning (beware, I am being geman and cynical ... so the necessary effort is really about 15 minutes of reading the manual) to replicate your online life in a local instance. Which is possible, because Open-Xchange is open source. Client and Server.

What has all that to do with the cloud? The answer is fairly easy. The server can be extended to run against any place on the internet where you want to store your data. Workloads become runnable by any one service provider with a virtualization facility. Amazon EC2 or anyone in that space. And the data will reside where its owner decides.

This might be looked at as counter to hosters current strategies. The contrary is true. Because hosters sell bandwidth. And storage. And service levels without pain. And so on, and on, and on. And a replicated repository of an endusers most critical business data will become a given. Multiplying the opportunity in an already exploding market.

Open-Xchange is offering exactly the same thing like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple etc. - well, our hosting partners like Network Solutions or 1and1.com do - but it is fully well possible to migrate / copy / replicate your data with all features in-house today. And replication will become seamless, automatically. Manually it is there today already.

Quite a difference.

I hope you agree.