Are you thinking about cloud computing?

Cloud computing is still a very ill-defined concept, with definitions that vary by user industry and from IT vendor to vendor. But most agree that cloud computing provides access to IT resources that are outside the traditional data center, in a shared resource across enterprises units, simple to use and accessible over the Web. Important attributes include rapidly scaling the cloud to meet demand, virtualization to keep cost down, and paying only for usage.

InformationWeek just published a the results of a survey of 250 IT managers which showed that over 80% of managers are implementing some sort of public or private cloud and 66% of respondents have dedicated budgets for cloud computing and think these budgets will grow over the next two years.

What is so interesting about the survey results is that the majority of the IT managers see “platform as a service” (PaaS) and “infrastructure as a service” (IaaS) as important innovations enabled by the cloud, perhaps more important than the more widely accepted “software as a service” (SaaS).

SaaS is closest to the model we’re used to: a software subscription for on-demand usage rather than a typical perpetual license. Add in hosting the application, and we’re in the territory of PaaS: the delivery of a computing platform along with a software solution. PaaS facilitates the deployment of applications without having to buy and manage hardware and software compatibility, upgrades, and the needs of varying users. In many cases, especially when as compute-intensive as FEA, one would think that buyers would prefer PaaS, but my informal research shows that engineering enterprises are still choosing to the most of their analyses in-house. For now, concerns over security and transmission speed/accuracy outweigh lowering the cost of owning their own compute resources.

In an IaaS scenario, clients buy servers, switches and other data center resources as a fully outsourced service and are billed only for resources consumed. Since hardware is pointless without software, IaaS providers typically supply some software, such as Amazon’s SimpleDB database service.

At this moment, desktop computers around the world are idle, waiting for people to return from summer holidays. Network all of these together to enable computing from any to any, and you could have a cloud or grid that could be the equivalent of an HPC center without the heavy upfront investment. But it would be in internal/private cloud, and I don’t see how that is any cheaper than an IT center. Indeed, it may be more difficult to manage because of the dispersion of assets. It does, however, allay the fears of those hesitant to “throw their intellectual property out there.”

Enter Amazon, an early provider of cloud hosting as a way of utilizing its vast e-tailing infrastructure. Amazon yesterday announced its Virtual Private Cloud which offers access to its services through a virtual private network — a more secure, “private” way for a company to transmit to an external cloud. Data is stored in the same set of machines that store other enterprises’ information, but the VPN connection could address the security concerns of many organizations trying to decide between internal and external clouds.

Cloud computing is a fascinating topic and one that all application vendors are watching. After all, ten years ago, sales and sales prospect information was considered a closely-kept secret that would never have been put anywhere that could be accessed by a competitor. Yet today many organizations rely on Salesforce.com to manage the sales process. Will PLM buyers demand the same type of flexibility?

Of course, as with any survey, the InfoWeek piece doesn’t address what I most want to know: how big are those cloud computing budgets and what are they buying? Maybe that’s in the next issue.