Intelligent Enterprise

I've been getting caught up on briefing notes and press releases since the TDWI conference and I've come to the conclusion that "as a service" is getting played out as a marketing term. The new and exciting term now being borrowed from the Web world is "in the cloud."

Companies have been throwing out the " aaS" as in SaaS in favor of " itC." While there is a difference between the two, many companies never figured out if they were SaaS or a managed hosting environment. Now they're doing the same thing with SitC and SaaS. I expect to see more confusing messages in the market as vendors rush to the next buzzword.

So who are the new "in the cloud" vendors? I'm ignoring the cloud service vendors here who help you put something into a cloud, instead just looking at databases and related products.

Amazon SimpleDB (in beta)
Google BigTable
LongJump

And the vendors moving offerings in this direction?

EnterpriseDB Postgres Plus Advanced Server Cloud Edition
Microsoft SQLServer Data Services
MySQL Enterprise for Amazon EC2
Vertica for the Cloud

You spreadmart/spreadsheet fans will love this video showing how to use some open source code with Google spreadsheets as a database in the cloud.

Interesting that open source and startup vendors have been all over this topic, while the more traditional vendors are still working things out.

Note: I wrote this before seeing what's new on IE, and there's a fine interview with Don Feinberg going into more detail about the differences between managed hosting, "as a service" and "in the cloud."