Emerging of the cloud computing in big companies

It looks like that all the big companies are trying to push as many applications into the cloud as they can. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM andSalesforce.com are offering their users with their cloud computing architecture.

Amazon offered the Simple Storage Service, which give the user unlimited and inexpensive online storage at the rate of $0.15 per gigabyte per month.

Microsoft offered the Windows Live SkyDrive, now still in beta stage, with a one-gigabyte free storage limit.

Salesforce.com offered its cloud computing infrastructure to other companies through its AppExchange. According to Phil Wainewright’s article: How is AppExchange really doing? The AppExchange breaks the link to Salesforce.com's core CRM application, making it possible for the first time to sign up as a customer for AppExchange applications without the extra cost of licensing the CRM component. The AppExchange applications pay the same $50 fee whether you run one or ten applications; or $100 if you want to run any number from eleven upwards.

IBM is also going to offer its cooperative users with its Blue cloud since late 2007. Blue Cloud, built on IBM’s expertise in leading massive-scale computing initiatives, will be based on open standards and open source software supported by IBM software, systems technology and services.

Besides the official service like Google Calendar, Picasa, YouTube, Gmail and Google Doc, Google recently offered the Google App engine . Google App engine could enable the user to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications. In other word, Google is trying to offer the user other than the official Google services, but also want to enable the user services dip inside the Google cloud.