Monthly Archives: October 2008

Cloud computing is a new concept that many confuse with grid computing. This emerging technology incorporates technologies like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Web 2.0 where reliance is on the internet to satisfy user needs. A few examples would be Salesforce.com, Google Apps and Amazon EC2, where the software resides on servers in the cloud, and users merely access them, most commonly through an internet browser.

Applications served up via the cloud usually occur at much lower costs to the consumer because there is no software to buy, no licensing, or no maintenance to deal with. When used as a service most customers are billed for usage, or have a subscription as is the case with Salesforce.com, the leader in SaaS for Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Salesforce.com is able to further reduce costs by running their application on a multi-tenant architecture. What this means is they have only one copy of the application serving multiple customers. This reduces development costs by having only one application to maintain and upgrade. It also reduces server cost, because servers are not sitting around idly waiting for requests, as is the case with dedicated servers or client-server architecture.