What are they thinking? And is this what the cloud has come to?
With the recent announcement that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) is going to add IaaS as a tradeable commodity just as it has space on its exchange for trading other commodities like bananas, oil and copper raises an interesting question.
Is the market for cloud services so mature that there really is little to distinguish between the providers?
And what is IaaS?
To put it into perspective, there are three levels to cloud the computing structure:
1. IaaS: Infastructure as a Service. The virtual machines, the networking and the storage
2. PaaS: Platform as a Service. The database servers, the web servers, etc
3. SaaS: Software as a Service. The applications that we use
And what CME is saying is that the bottom layer is a commodity. That there is no real difference between the offerings from Amazon, Google & Microsoft. That computing power is tradable in the same way that energy is. That price becomes the key determinant of between the market players at this layer & that differentiation at the PaaS & SaaS layers will be the increasing focus of the game in the time ahead.
For more see Dellium Advisory
IT Considerations 
Leave a Reply