Cloud computing, one of the newest buzzwords for distributed computing architectures dating back over 2 decades is gaining respectability in various circles for business applications.   IT managers are looking more and more at the potential of using cloud computing to service their everyday business needs.   In many respects, the clouds they use are within their own data centers; however there is a definite migration towards the "Open" cloud of hosted service. This does not mean IT managers are willing to trust their secure communications or corporate data secrets to servers not under their control, but there is a groundswell of start-ups and established players offering hosted services, tools and applications that is breaking down their resistance.

Among these offerings are: application development and deployment services, (both open source and proprietary), performance monitoring, load balancers, data bases, storage, Web application hosting, and operating systems geared towards grid-like operation.   

It is obvious that communications applications will soon be serviced by cloud computing architectures, but how will they come about?   Will the impetus come from Service Providers looking to reduce cost within their own Application Server clusters or will it come from the Social Networking community enabling the myriad of "long tail" services using Web 2.0 programming paradigms.     The former would not be difficult to achieve with virtual machines, but it is rare for a service provider to co-locate application functionality on a common set of equipment.   Meanwhile, we see Ruby on Rails and Java-based cloud computing solutions gaining popularity in the social networking community.  

The real driver here will of-course be economics.   Cloud computing has huge up-side to any new service or any services which are temporal in nature.  New services benefit from the cheapness offered by spare available MIPS coupled with the piece of mind inherent in the cloud's scalability (should the service proove wildly successful).   Temporal services, (services whose demands vary as a function of time) are an ideal fit for clouds.   The time frame could be things which vary with time of day or could be services (such as voting or polling) which come and go with the season or a Television show. 

This will be exciting to watch as the power of the cloud makes this a compelling approach to telecommunications