Oracle has played a huge role in making Grid Computing, better know as cloud computing relevant to enterprises with ground breaking products such as Oracle Real Applications Clusters, Automatic Storage Management, and Storage Grid.
Oracle has brought Grid Computing to middleware with the Application Grid approach to infrastructure. These products/technologies make the enterprise IT infrastructure elastic so that it can grow incrementally without any theoretical upper limit, as well as provide the flexibility to move resources around in order to meet dynamic business priorities.
Companies that offer Oracle Cloud Servers:
- Amazon EC2
- Rackspace Cloud
- Terremark Cloud Hosting
- Connectria Cloud Hosting
- OpSource Cloud Servers
- StrataScale
You know, I’m a big fan of the custom application. Something built from the ground up to meet the end user’s needs. That’s why I love ApEx so much, it makes making such applications so much easier than before. I would not say I’m against SaaS. If you have a concept that’s generic enough, and a web based platform works well for it, then by all means go for it. I just hate ending up with bloatware of which I only use 10 or 20 percent of the features.
As for the cloud, I would imagine it would really contribute to the flattening effect that was the subject of the book The World is Flat. It would really empower the small to mid-size business that can not afford the IT Infrastructure necessary to meet all their needs.
