New weapons for the cloud computing battle

Well, here we are in mid-2010 and cloud computing is still in its nascent stages--even in the face of industry hype and the market's anticipation.

Depending on where you stand in the world of information technology, or where your customers stand, the cloud is either a far-off promise of powerful solutions and growth or a viable, efficient and strong option today.

Much investment has yet to be made in building out application support for cloud-based IT, and much investment has yet to be made in building enterprise-level uptime and reliability. It's getting better, though. For example, companies like Amazon.com provide more transparency than ever into their own uptime and reliability numbers, and a number of third-party companies, such as Apparrent Networks, provide better tools for monitoring and benchmarking performance of cloud services and infrastructure.

Microsoft, too, has launched its own platform and set of tools for developers to start writing for the cloud and provides new options for ISVs that didn't exist a year ago.

This month we take a look at several companies that are bringing new weapons to the cloud computing battle and try to examine whether they make sense for most developers, VARs and customers. It's still a mixed bag of functionality and complexity and, in the end, we're left waiting for continued improvement throughout the cloud.

But in this issue, we can point to several companies, technologies and solutions as reasons for optimism.