No, this post isn’t about an episode of South Park – it’s inspired by an entertaining and insightful presentation about cloud computing posted on Simon Wardley’s blog. Aside from a passion for ducks, Simon is an established thought leader and engaging public speaker, with a deep understanding of technology, economics and mathematics. These fields of expertise combine with a scientific background to give a broad analysis and insight into past and future trends. I’ve been avidly following Simon’s blog since watching him speak about innovation at FOWA ’08.

Cloud computing is quite rightly a topic du jour – and no doubt most readers will be familiar with the term. Software and hardware are moving from a product-based economy (i.e. in-house) to a service-based economy (i.e. on-demand, Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, the list goes on – hence *aaS), through commoditisation and componentisation.

The *aaS movement has been picking up momentum over the past few years, starting with scoped SaaS (e.g. Gmail), and moving towards PaaS (e.g. Salesforce), that may be used to extend and create applications that live in the cloud, to support unique business process requirements. Even Microsoft, leaders in the software “product” world, made further steps towards being an *aaS provider by today unveiling their Azure Services Platform.

Standing on the shoulders of giants has its advantages: when compared to the majority of businesses that maintain their business applications in-house, large *aaS providers should be be capable of providing a higher level of availability, security and scalability on applications and data served from their infrastructure. A lower TCO combined with less hassle managing the foundations should lead to increased efficiencies and faster rate of innovation. For example, it should be quicker to deploy an application across multiple devices on the cloud, since this added complexity is often handled automatically into the *aaS provider’s platform.

Whilst most *aaS discussion evangelises about the advantages of moving your business into the cloud, Simon discusses the pitfalls that *aaS consumers should consider, and *aaS suppliers should address. The problems include vendor lock-in and interoperability issues due to a lack of open standards and choice. What happens when a major *aaS provider goes boom?

Notably, the founding father of the GNU open source movement, Richard Stallman, agrees that that there is much to be afraid of in a cloud computing – even branding it as “stupidity” and a “marketing hype campaign” in a Guardian interview, despite the fact that most *aaS providers will build on top of an open-source stack.

Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems compares modern cloud services to Altavista is 1996 and believes the next big phase in cloud computing “doesn’t have to come from a big company”, should have “no aroma of lock-in” and of course be “really easy to get started with”.

If you’ve read this far, then I’m sure you will also enjoy Simon’s presentation, which is gratefully embedded below. I encourage all interested in this topic to to dig deeper in his blog, RSS feed and tweets.

Which *aaS providers do you know that fit the bill? I’m using both WordPress and Sugar CRM – both of which offer a choice between a managed and open source solution. On the other hand, I’m happy to sacrifice some freedoms to Google Apps in return for ending my battle with spam. Or maybe that’s just another case of having limited choice?

My next post, which is hopefully due in a the next few days, is about the awesome Agavi PHP Framework – stay tuned!