I saw an interesting story today that I thought could be one
of the first major deals which could help small business gain access to a
variety of different applications which have been developed through a verified
channel and be hosted on high availability trusted systems.
The announcement was specific to a partnership between
Intuit Inc and Microsoft. Currently Intuit offers an online workplace
application center where their customers can go to look through various
applications which can be purchased to fulfill specific company demands. With
the partnership Intuit will have a close relationship with Microsoft’s Windows
Azure cloud platform and offer their developers the ability to host a variety
of applications on the platform. The platform also offers a variety of
development tools which can be used by developers to raise productivity and to
offer closer integration specific to the Azure platform. What Microsoft gets
out of this is access to the large customer base that Intuit has through its
very successful Quickbooks software. Companies developing applications for the
Azure platform will now be able to have close integration with the Quickbooks
platform and data.
These types of announcements will only become more
commonplace as the idea of cloud commuting gains momentum and the trust in
these services rise. At some point the thought of only housing your businesses
data inside the confines of the company’s servers will become old hat as the
security and growth of these technologies gain traction. The thought of having
a trustworthy secure location for data which allows a business an added layer
of protection will make many businesses happy as this is a big concern of
businesses. Of course the flipside of
this is security; one of the biggest concerns at this point is the security of
this data once it leaves the company’s control. This trust will be hard to earn
but once it is businesses will use these services to offer not only backup facilities
but also utilize them for their ability to offload application traffic by
hosting some applications of these facilities.
-sean
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