Cloudy in China?

Cloud Computing must be picking up momentum. Just look at the "first Cloud Computing Conference" in Beijing, which has attracted quite a few IT vendors, large or not-so-large, and China Mobile, to show up in force. Microsoft talked about Windows Azure, EMC about storage as a service, VMware (who else) on virtualization, and Cordys on Situational Applications in the Cloud... And China Mobile had a big booth (relatively speaking) displaying its "Big Cloud" platform.

A few VCs also had a panel discussion on the topic of "Cloud Computing and SaaS." The impression I got out of it, though, is that they didn't really know what they were talking about. At the end of the day, Cloud Computing is a re-branding of many things that have been happening since the late '90s. The technologies have been there for quite some time. It's the business models that have lagged behind.

The top SaaS vendors, led by Salesforce.com, haven't been that big or profitable. The traditional vendors, such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, don't really lack the SaaS applications that they can sell. They are probably just trying to be careful not to disrupt their current cash cows. In addition, the platform vendors among them, especially Oracle, can sell more platform licenses to SaaS developers, hosting service providers, and other entities in the ecosystem.

So my prediction is that the big guys will not only survive, they will get bigger in the process. I don't know if there is going to be any new platform rising as a result of cloud computing. Google might be the only one that could potentially come up with something. The rest will be all SaaS developers using the existing platforms, and the service providers (like China Mobile) who host them.