Who provides what in the cloud

AT&T: Scalable hosting in a managed network

AT&T Synaptic Hosting aims to give datacenters the ability to manage applications, compute resources on servers, and stored data elastically, so they can scale up or down as needed. The hosted platform provides dynamic security and storage capabilities as well as a Web portal to manage capacity, conduct maintenance, and monitor network service and performance.

AT&T has long offered hosting services, but not ones that could scale up or down as needed. AT&T's resources and services run within its own network, rather than across datacenters linked via the public Internet, which the company claims provides more certainty over server levels.

Google: Resources for small businesses and developers

Google already offers several cloud-based services, such as e-mail and storage, for consumers, a well as the AppEngine development and provisioning platform for individual developers. The company's logical next step, given its vast infrastructure resources, would be a move into the enterprise cloud market.

"There's not that much difference between the enterprise cloud and the consumer cloud," Google CEO Eric Schmidt said last May during an appearance in Los Angeles with IBM chief Sam Palmisano, as the companies announced a joint cloud computing initiative. Over the next year or so, Google and IBM plan to roll out a worldwide network of servers for a cloud computing infrastructure. The IBM-Google cloud runs on Linux-based machines using Xen virtualization and Apache Hadoop, an open source implementation of the Google File System. Provisioning is automatic, courtesy of IBM's Tivoli Provisioning Manager.

IBM: A platform for your "internal" cloud

Aside from its Google venture, IBM is focusing its cloud strategy on "Blue Cloud," a series of cloud computing offerings that will enable computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms. Built on IBM's massive-scale computing initiatives, Blue Cloud aims to give datacenters the ability to establish their own cloud computing architecture to handle the enormous data-processing power required for video, social networking, and other Web 2.0 technologies.

Initially, the Blue Cloud technology must be deployed internally at each organization, essentially as the foundation for an "internal" cloud. The Blue Cloud platform, running on IBM BladeCenters with Power and x86 processors and Tivoli service management software, dynamically provisions and allocates resources as workloads fluctuate for an application. Blue Cloud is being billed as a more distributed computing architecture than typically found in most enterprise datacenters. It is based on Hadoop. Over time, IBM expects to offer Blue Cloud resources on demand, in the provisioned style of Amazon.com and AT&T.

IBM also provides hosting services for SaaS providers, including SAP and SucecssFactors.