MARAVEDIS

What is now called Cloud Computing is a term that is being used for hosted computing environments as well as public Internet services used by people and groups in all manner of ways. The term was coined montly by the IT industry even though the International Telecommunicaitons Union has embraced cloud environments as the major trend in communications.

The terms used in cloud computing are a subject of recent open cloud forum discussions so it makes sense to disucss them here:

The term 'Public Cloud' has been questioned as infering cloud environments that are publically owned and, therefore, does not aptly describe the public facing cloud but what more often are privately owned, commercial offerings.

This should not be any more confusing than the distinctions for other services and products: telecommunications services, software and services often have public retail services that are offered to anyone who is within the public area these are sold or offered as free/ad supported services or VC funded start ups hoping to rake in the money downstream (YouTube, Twitter, etc.).

As public offerings the packaged product, service, web content, etc. has to comply with laws and market norms for non-discriminatory access. Companies or groups can require distribution agreements and can set pricing policies pretty much as they see fit but they cannot be arbitrary to the extent it violates antitrust or other laws or it fails to win acceptance by the market. Cloud computing is similar to many types of software and IT services that is differentiated by type of user and degree of customization, training, and other activity.

The use of the term 'Public Cloud' might be substituted with 'Open Cloud' but care should be taken not to get overly complicated. Public Cloud is being used and is appropriate because it can easily be defined within a couple sentences:

Public Cloud: Cloud ICT that is provided openly to the public as a general service or software product.


If you want to start defining terms, let's start with "Cloud Computing" That is not an appropriate term to define the new wave of communications plus computing that are critical to making use of the new environment.

"Cloud ICT": The internationally recognized evolution of information and communications technologies that connects people, place, content and computing resources to leveraged advantage.

Robert Syputa
Partner, Co-Founder Maravedis