Ray Ozzie plugs Amazon Web Services

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Jesper Joergensen's Blog | March 10, 2008  10:37 AM | Comments (1)

Gigaom posted an interview with Ray Ozzie containing the following question and answer (taken a bit out of context):

OM: It (mesh-oriented apps) sounds like a great idea, but in reality can we actually deliver that kind of a mesh app architecture, and how soon?

RAY OZZIE: I think that you’ll see is over the course of this year, to 18 months, you’ll see the incumbents and startups, both, do their first big volleys of services platform, apps tools, runtimes, various things. It really isn’t being taken seriously right now by anybody except Amazon. They’ve done the world a service by putting out there some fairly provocative, interesting services.

(emphasis mine)

This is exactly how I feel about Amazon's web services after having played around with EC2.

After going through my experience I brought it up in conversations with many different people inside and outside BEA. Some people knew about EC2, very few, if any, knew exactly how it worked and it took a bit of time to explain. People used to working with VM images (mostly from VMware) understand the virtual OS image part, but the whole thing about command lines that boot up virtual computers in the cloud and all the aspects that come with it take a bit of time to "get". It did for me too, but once you get it, you can't stop thinking of what kind of opportunities it offers.

I am not saying that it's the best thing since sliced bread and you're waaay behind if you haven't already built your business model on it. What fascinates me is a sense that we don't know yet how this will be used. People will build businesses on Amazon's services and we don't know if the approach will be a niche or main stream. It could greatly speed up innovation and delivery of services without ending up as a mainstream platform. Or it could be copied and perfected by another company. I think it's a wide open field right now and I don't think we get to experience a wide open field that often. So I am excited.

Comments

• I couldn't agree more Jesper. And now they have SimpleDB too: cloud + storage (S3) + database

  Posted by: jonmountjoy on March 12, 2008 at 7:00 AM