People who have worked around Internet applications for some time remeber that first there was ASPs (Application Service Providers) which seem to describe well, a company that hosted applications and sold a service to companies interested in using the applications.  Next came SaaS (Software as a Service), which is basically offing the same thing.

When the term was first coined, Cloud Computing was promised to offer something unique.   Processing resources could scale on demand and they were geographically dispersed, providing multi-nationals the ability to get consistent performance globally.   Now that cloud computing has become “popularized” these distinctions are no longer called out.   Everyone wants on the “cloud computing” band wagon, if for nothing more than stronger marketing perception than SaaS, and with that comes the potential for higher company valuations.

True to the original definition,  most popular cloud service today is undoubtedly Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), which does tout infinitely scalable resources.

Great opportunities exist in the “Cloud Computing” market in the next few years.  If you need results hire a professional familiar with the market and the ecosystem.

.