International Dinner

My blog has gained page views recently, thanks to other bloggers linking to my site. A very recent link to my wordpress blog comes from a Japanese media Website ^_^

Besides the fact, that this is pretty cool (I feel a bit like Homer in the Simpsons episode where he finds the washing powder box with his head as a logo) and I am not sure what Kilimanjaro has actually written (Google Translate is kind of vague), it made me think that the cloud discussions are a bit too US-centric. What about companies and users in other countries?

Germany

The biggest software player in Germany and Europe is SAP. From talks with SAP researchers I know that they are working on scalable architectures and are exploring the potential of cloud computing. However, the tenor seems to be that using external resources, e.g. Amazon S3, imposes to much latency. Besides, moving large amounts of data is not efficient – and we are talking about really large amounts of business data. A researcher explained it to me this way: “We don’t want to move the data to the processors, we want to move the processors to the data.”

Since SAP runs a software business for enterprise customers, they have an inherent interest in scalable architectures. Think, what happens in a big automotive company with 200,000 employees when year-end closing approaches.

Therefore SAP might be a cloud computing competitor for IBM, not for Amazon or Google. An employee from the biggest IBM lab in Germany told me that the IBM strategy was “value business, not volume business”. Well, that sounds like a viable strategy for SAP, too.

China

Knowing a few words Chinese, I noticed that Cloud Computing (云计算) is a hot topic in the People’s Republic. The IBM is involved in a big project with a software park located in the city of WuXi. IT startups in the software park usually struggle with setting up their own infrastructure, up-front costs, etc. – what a great scenario for a private/enterprise cloud. IBM sells them the whole package: Xen or p5 hypervisor virtualized platform, DB2, WebSphere and Tivoli.

References:

http://server.chinabyte.com/cloudcomputing/

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/zones/hipods/