Get Ready for the Peak of the Cloud Computing Hype Cycle

You know you are in the middle of a hype cycle when companies stop referring to themselves as what they are, and start calling themselves something else. So it is that Akamai (News - Alert) Technologies CEO Paul Sagan now says Akamai is a cloud computing company, not a content delivery network.

 

The next thing you know somebody will declare it to be the "year of cloud computing," putting us a bit further down the hype cycle, deflating the wild optimism about the "next big thing" and allowing everybody to figure out how to use it productively.

 

In October 2008, "cloud computing" and "Web 2.0" were by a huge margin described as the "most irritating" buzz words in a survey conducted by Freeform Dynamics. Oddly enough, "virtualization" was viewed as "most inspiring" by an even greater percentage of survey respondents.

 

Since data center "virtualization" and "cloud computing" are related, if sometimes confused, concepts, that's an interesting dichotomy.

 

"As our clients evolve more and more to take advantage of cloud computing, we're continuing to invest in even more advanced solutions to help them realize the full potential of network computing over the Internet," Sagan says.

 

While acknowledging that cloud computing "happens to be the phrase of the day that everyone wants to use," Sagan went on to justify how Akamai and its distributed architecture fit into the market for cloud services.

 

"It's really about network and distributed computing, and virtualized  infrastructure rather than dedicating a machine, or a license, or a person for each instance of an application or each end-users use of it," Sagan said.

 

It therefore is obvious why some executives in some parts of the telecom industry are intrigued. If you are in the data center business, it's new business. If you are in the wide area networking business, it's more demand for large pipes.

 

At some level, abstracting server locations also provides some of the business logic behind consolidating "switch" locations when adopting soft switches.

 

Edge computing and application acceleration might be thought of as examples of cloud services, or so Akamai now is trying to position the matter.

 

"We're already delivering on much of the promise of cloud computing with our edge computing offerings, which we introduced almost six years ago," Sagan says. "This is where we host and deliver applications from the Akamai cloud. The tens of thousands of servers we control around the world and manage like one big resource on behalf of our clients.

 

Application acceleration likewise might be thought of as a necessary feature to make distributed and remote applications behave as though they were housed on a local server.

 

The hype will crest and then fall, as all hype cycles do. The odd thing is that cloud computing is more an information technology issue than a communications issue, of more importance to providers of Web-based services and enterprises than communications service providers.

 

And though some will say the concept shows how communications and information technology have become one big business, nobody in the business really believes that, or acts as though it is true. Regulators and academics like it, and have for decades. But it is far too abstract to describe most of what sees on a daily basis in either IT or communications businesses.

 

None of that will stop the hype cycle, though. "Nailing down the cloud is difficult because its definition has been expanded to include everything companies wish to sell," says Gartner (News - Alert). "While it has great potential, many of the claims being made about cloud computing have lead some to the point of 'irrational exuberance' and unrealistic expectations."