Five ways of defining cloud computing

5. "I typically break up the idea of cloud computing into three camps:

"Enablers - These are companies that enable the underlying infrastructures or the basic building blocks. These companies are typically focused on data center automation and or server virtualization (VMware/EMC,Citrix,BladeLogic, RedHat, Intel, Sun, IBM, Enomalism, etc.).

"Providers - (Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Google, Microsoft). The ones with the budgets and know-how to build out global computing environments costing millions or even billions of dollars. Cloud providers typically offer their infrastructure or platform. Frequently these 'As a Service' offerings are billed & consumed on a utility basis."

"Consumers - On the other side of the spectrum I see the 'consumers' companies that build or improve their Web applications on top of existing clouds of computing capacity without the need to invest in data centres or any physical infrastructure. Often these two groups can be one in the same such as Amazon (SQS,SDB,etc), Google (Apps) and Salesforce (Force). But they can also be new startups that provide tools & services that sit on top of the cloud (Cloud management).

"Cloud consumers can be a fairly broad group including just about any application that is provided via a Web-based service like a Webmail, blogs, social network, etc. Cloud computing from the consumer point of view is becoming the only way you build, host and deploy a scalable Web application."

At least we've gotten that cleared up.