Getting a foothold in the Cloud

Quite an interesting point that Gary Orenstein of GigaOm makes in his post titled "VMware Is The New Microsoft, Just Without an OS". The crux of the discussion is that VMware has over the last 10 years has assembled together all the pieces necessary to cut right between the operating system and the ecosystem of apps. While the first half of the decade saw apps being developed on tools residing over the OS and being tied to the OS, the latter half has seen the rise of cloud. It is this cloud that VMware wants to exploit by doing two things primarily

1. Get the developer community to develop over the cloud by providing tools. Ex: CloudFoundry by VMware, SpringSource acquisition
2. Get the apps rolled out over the Platform and keep them OS agnostic. Ex: Zimbra, SlideRocket, etc

This brings to the fore 3 approaches cloud vendors are taking

1. Microsoft - Being the OS incumbent, it is slowly providing access to all desktop software via the Cloud through its Live.com platform
2. Google - Being the SaaS native player, Google has created a thin OS in the form Chrome OS and we will be seeing netbooks with Chrome OS start of July 2011.
3. VMWare - The infrastructure player whose focus will be the platform on the cloud and ruling the roost there.

Enterprises will be forced to choose between the offerings of a clutch of such players as vendors move faster than ever into making enterprise cloud computing a reality.

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